WHAT YOU DO: document your findings and analyse them, drawing out recommendations.
THE OUTCOME: SMART recommendations lead to improvements in your impact assessment processes.
You have collected your data. Now it’s time to make your analysis, draft some recommendations and improve your impact assessment processes. Whatever approach you have taken, you will have to document and analyse what you have learned and how you want to use it. This means that you will have to arrange it in some way so that you can analyse it and draw out recommendations.
Tip. Consider adding a review point to your document and putting a reminder in your agenda, and revisiting it at a later date to check in on what improvements have been implemented.
Data analysis
Phase two of the Impact Playbook shares guidance and tips on data analysis. To keep this Phase concise, we won’t replicate that here.
Write your summary
It is helpful to arrange the findings from the past steps, whether you undertook a debrief, shared a questionnaire, or led a TBI cycle, into a summary - something short and concise (like we did with Europeana XX above). You can then add in your recommendations.
Developing actionable recommendations
Actionable recommendations should be SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. That means that you should:
Identify to whom they apply (e.g. the senior management team, curators).
Organise them according to a timeline for implementation. Consider short, medium and long-term, or immediately, or a timeline (e.g. identifying specific months of a project process).
Identify those recommendations which are essential in contrast to those which are nice to have (not essential). Put essential and urgent recommendations first.
Be clear about the purpose/action that is being recommended.
Write in a numbered list or bullet-point format.
Be concise, but include explanatory text if necessary.
Include or begin with a modal auxiliary verb, for example by starting with ‘must, should, could’, or using an active verb like ‘create a new digital archive’.
Checklist
You have documented your write-up and recommendations so you can come back to these at a later date.
Each recommended improvement can be clearly explained and linked back to the data and analysis.
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