Keeping Zahmoo internally for the time being
Just a quick update on Zahmoo. As you know this project has been a labour of love for us for some time now and while there are so many other things on that distract us from Zahmoo development we have decided to use Zahmoo internally at Anecdote for a while and iron out the glitches before opening it up to a wider audience.
Please contact us if you would like to engage our consulting services to get a version of Zahmoo working inside your firewall.
Rick Davies has revamped his web site
I just got an email from Rick pointing me to his new look website. It’s a great resource for anyone interested in monitoring and evaluation and in particular Most Significant Change.
Sneek peek of Zahmoo
Here is a 4 minutes video giving you an overview of where we are at with Zahmoo.
Beta testing is happening
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. My apologies. We created a version of Zahmoo and then decided it wasn’t good enough so we started again. I’m pleased to say we have a new version up and running now and we are doing the testing so we can make it more widely available. Thanks for your patience.
Update
For those people keeping an eye on Zahmoo and waiting for our beta release, you will be pleased to know that we have now done a couple of iterations in alpha and things are looking good. We will be picking up the pace with Zahmoo and taking it off the back burner to be front and centre of our activities at Anecdote. Thanks for hanging in their with us.
MSC as a management development technique
For the last year we have been running a management development program for a pharmaceutical firm and at the centre of the two day program, which is run every month, is Most Significant Change. At the beginning of the year we collected 200 anecdotes illustrating good and bad management behaviour and then use these anecdotes in the workshop. The feedback has been tremendous and our client has extended the project based on its success. By going through the MSC selection process the managers embed examples of what effect their behaviours have on staff.
We are still working on this baby
My apologies for not updating you sooner. We’ve hit a couple of architectural snags and rather than release a version of Zahmoo you might be unhappy with, we’ve decided to work through the issues to make the user experience as simple as possible. Thanks for your patience on this.
Where are we at with Zahmoo?
You might be wondering what is happening with Zahmoo? The main reason for the delay is our busy lives over at Anecdote. Zahmoo is a labour of love and while we have made great progress and actually have an alpha version of the software working, I’m holding things up with a list of things I need to do that seems to be constantly trumped by other priorities. Please be patient and thanks for you all your help and interest so far.
A new paper from Intrac
This paper provides a reflection on a pilot experience of using the ‘Most Significant Change’ (MSC) methodology to evaluate the capacity building services of CABUNGO, a local capacity building support provider in Malawi. MSC is a story-based, qualitative and participatory approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E). INTRAC and CABUNGO worked collaboratively to adapt and implement the MSC approach to capture the complex and often intangible change resulting from capacity building.
The paper shows how CABUNGO has achieved significant impacts on the sustainability and effectiveness of the NGOs and community-based organisations (CBOs) with which it has worked. These impacts were felt not only on attitudes, skills, knowledge and behaviour, but also in relationships and power dynamics. The key advantages of using MSC to evaluate capacity building are assessed in relation to its ability to capture and consolidate the different perspectives of stakeholders, to aid understanding and conceptualisation of complex change, and to enhance organisational learning. These advantages are considered in light of the potential difficulties around adopting a qualitative approach in an environment in which donor requirements are focused on measuring achievements against specific quantitative data.
[via Johannes R. Schot on the MSC Forum]
A Spanish version of the Most Significant Change Guide is now available
This news was just announced on the MSC email list.
A Spanish translation of the MSC Guide has been completed. It
includes the functional chapters of the guide: Chapters 1-6 from the
overview through implementing, troubleshooting, capability building,
using MSC within an M&E framework and validity and voice in MSC.
The cover page and the table of contents are also included.
RSS FEED