The Importance of Proactive Planning for Measuing Project Performance

Unless a project has defined in advance how it wishes to evaluate social performance, little can be done—at least, not without a ton of added legwork.

Pro-active planning begins with project design, when explicit consideration of the project’s physical and social footprint is used to formulate integrated social and economic interventions toaccount for potential social and economic impacts and local and regional consequences.

At the outset, a project should ask and answer the following questions:

• What are the opportunities to include social considerations in project design and planning?
• What trade-offs exist between project-defined optimal design and “socially optimal” design?
• How will the project benefit from proactive management of social considerations?

Project social development design and budget decisions are made throughout the project cycle and must change in response to the outcomes of formal environmental and social impact assessments (ESIA) and resulting management plans. At the time of initial project planning, a project has the option to begin planning for its real or expected benefits in short- and long-term horizons.

Designing Baseline Studies for Optimal Project Social and Environmental Performance

Setring Project Performance Targets

Designing Baseline Field Surveys

It is critical to design surveys to withstand scrutiny across disciplines.

Regretablly, a survey of publicly-availble tools for social performance evaluation suugests that there really is no 'standard approach' to social performance evaluation.

Not finding what I was looking for on the web concerning socio-economic survey design, I started writing about it here.