Pet Peeves: Kakiebos & Cosmos

I have been doing M&E for about five years or so. In this time, I have come to develop a list of "Pet Peeves" which I will refer to as the "Kakiebos & Cosmos" list for the purposes of this blog. I am sure that I am not the only person that experience these. And I am sure many of these peeves are not unique to the M&E field. In fact, I would venture to say that these things are probably as common as kakiebos(1) or cosmos(2).

Here is my list:

* "Door stop" evaluations. In other words people commision evaluations that lead to reports that are ever only used as door stops, and nothing else.

* "Lottery" evaluations. These are the kind of evaluations where the client gives you (and 25 other service providers) no more than half a page background about the project and expects you to come up with a 25 page proposal that details exactly what needs to be done... Without any indication of what the budget should be... Its like playing the lottery where you have a one in twenty five chance to actually win the assignment.

*"SCiI Evaluations" These are the evaluations where "Scope Creep is Inevitable" and you end up writing the client's evaluation report, annual report, management presentation and also plan next year's evaluation.

*"PR Evaluations" You are engaged to do an evaluation. So you tell the story about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Fairy Godmother's role in all of it. When you submit the first draft of your report, your client complains that it "Isn't what we envisioned". The euphemism for "What in the world are you thinking? We can't tell people we did not make any impact! Rewrite the report and change all of the findings so that we can impress the boss / shareholders / board / funder!!!"

* "Pandora's Box" evaluations. This is the kind of evaluation your clients let you do while they know there are a myriad of other unrelated issues that will make your job close to impossible. These evaluations tend to happen in the middle of organisational restructuring / just before the boss is suspended for embezzling funds / whilst a forensic audit is happening and everyone is in "hiding" / a year after the online database was started without any training for the users

* "Tell me the pretty story" evaluations. These are the kinds of evaluations where you are expected to produce a pretty report full of pictures with smiling faces and heart-rendering stories, without a single statistic that helps the reader to grasp what the costs or benefits of the project / programme was.

Like kakiebos, these types of evaluations are abundant. And not very useful. Sometimes, these evaluations even resemble cosmos. Still thoroughly useless but at least very pretty to look at for short periods of time. In fact, like kakiebos and cosmos, these evaluations just tap resources that should have been available for doing useful things, like growing sunflowers.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe people that commission / do kakiebos & cosmos evaluations should be sentenced to 100 hours of community service? I think gardening might be a good punishment for them. What do you say?

(1) Kakiebos is the Afrikaans vernacular for the plant Tagetes minuta which is commonly found on disturbed earth e.g. next to roads and is commonly regarded as a weed.
(2) Cosmos is the vernacular for the plant Bidens spp. which is commonly found on disturbed earth e.g. next to roads and is commonly regarded as a weed. In March / April it is, however, quite a spectacular sight to see as these plants carry white, pink and purple flowers.