Evaluating Strategy: New Directions for Evaluation, Number 128

1. Strategy as the Focus for Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton, Patricia A. Patrizi).
This chapter examines what it means to treat strategy as the unit of analysis and focus for evaluation.

2. Strategy Evaluation: Experience at the International Development Research Centre (Tricia Wind, Fred Carden).
This chapter explains how IDRC uses strategic evaluations, and explores potential implications for evaluation of Henry Mintzberg’s ideas on tracking strategy.

3. Death Is Certain, Strategy Isn’t: Assessing the Robert Wood. Johnson Foundation’s End-of-Life Grant Making (Patricia A. Patrizi).
This chapter discusses a retrospective evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 20-year strategy to improve care at the end of life.

4. The W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s Devolution Initiative: An Experiment in Evaluating Strategy (Kay E. Sherwood).
Informed by the perspective of evaluation as a strategic intervention, this chapter revisits evaluation of a major and controversial government reform, welfare devolution, and a philanthropic foundation initiative that mobilized around the reform’s implications, including external evaluation of that initiative.

5. Strategy Evaluation: Emerging Processes and Methods (Patricia A. Patrizi).
This chapter distinguishes prospective and retrospective evaluations of strategy, and offers lessons on framing a strategy evaluation, determining strategy boundaries, and data collection and analysis.

Index.