Training & Education

An Introductory Guide to Adaptive Management for Project Leaders and Participants

Step 4. Monitoring

Monitoring is often neglected in conventional approaches to management, yet it is critical to improvement. Monitoring allows you to assess how actions actually affect indicators. This information then allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative actions, adjust models (i.e., hypotheses) of the system functions, and take appropriate corrective action. Monitoring can also determine if actions were implemented as planned, and may detect "surprising " events.

• implementation or compliance (did we do what we planned?);
• effectiveness (did the plan meet objectives?);
• validation of model parameters and relationships (which hypothesis is correct?);

4.2 Follow the monitoring protocol designed in Step 2.

Helpful tools and techniques

• consider using volunteers for some types of monitoring
• consider developing new, innovative and inexpensive monitoring techniques (e.g., videos or photographs of sites)