DFID How To Note: Reviewing and Scoring Projects Introduction

November 2011. Available as pdf.

” Introduction This guidance is to help DFID staff, project partners and other stakeholders use the scoring system and complete the latest templates when undertaking an Annual Review (AR) or Project Completion Review (PCR – but formerly known as Project Completion Report)) for projects due for review from January 2012.  This guidance applies to all funding types however separate templates are available for core contributions to multilateral organisations.  The guidance does not attempt to cover in detail how to organise the review process, although some help is provided.

Principal changes from previous templates        2
Introduction        2
What is changing?        3
What does it involve?        4
Using the logframe as a monitoring tool        5
If you don?t have a logframe        6
Assessing the evidence base        6
The Scoring System        6
Updating ARIES        7
Transparency and Publishing AR?s and PCR?s       7
Projects below £1m approved prior to the new Business Case format   8
Multilateral Core Contributions        9
Filling in the templates/ Guidance on the template contents     9
Completing the AR/PCR and information onto ARIES     19
Annex A:  Sample Terms of Reference ”

RD Comment: To my surprise, although this How To Note gives advice on how to assign weights to each outputs, it does not explain how these interact with output scores to generate a weighted achievement score for each output. Doing so would help explain why the weightings are being requested. At present weightings are requested but their purpose is not explained.

The achievement scoring system is a definite improvement on the previous system. The focus is now on actual achievement to date rather than expected achievement by the end of the project, and the scale is evenly balanced, with the top and bottom of the scale representing over and under-achievement respectively.

