Q6 - did the evaluation plan go to plan

This question asked whether an evaluation plan was written and presented in the application or the report. 9 interviewees said no and six said yes. Interesting that there were 7 people who originally stated that they evaluated (2 of which were evaluations of a product rather than the project) and yet only 6 had a plan. In fact two of the 6 yes's wrote a plan in their application but in actual fact they didn't end up evaluating. So to compare this:

	Evaluated the project?	Had an evaluation plan?
1	N	N
2	N	Y (in application)
3	N	Y (in application)
4	Y	N
5	Y	N
6	Y	Y
7	Y	N
8	N	N
9	N (evaluated the product)	Y
10	Y	Y
11	N	N
12	N	N
13	N (evaluated the product)	Y
14	N	N
15	N	N

Looking at the comments people made about whether the evaluation plan went to plan, there were two major themes running through the answers. The main one was that most people were thinking about the project – did IT run as planned, and not the evaluation (in some instances it could have been how I phrased the question). There appeared to be no linkage between having an evaluation plan and checking if it ran as planned ie no formative mechanisms or critical reflection checks along the way. The second theme was time. Most of those who talked about why the plan did not run as planned indicated that due to factors beyond their control or unplanned circumstances, the time it took to do the project/study meant either there was no time to do the evaluation or the project just ran out of time in general.
This could indicate that more time has to be built in to project planning for unexpected happenings that are bound to crop up.