Who reads the report besides the person who wrote it?
A merger between two healthcare institutions in Twente runs for fourteen months. Once the project is finished, the programme manager writes the evaluation report. That same person led the project, made the difficult calls, and worked through the delay in month nine. No one else reads the report before it goes to the board.
That is not unusual. It is the standard course of events for most project evaluations: the project lead writes, signs, and sends, without anyone else looking in between those three steps.
Four frameworks, one weak link
OECD DAC, the UK's Gate 5 review, PRINCE2 practice, and Stufflebeam's CIPP model were developed independently of each other, for very different purposes — development cooperation, government projects, project management, education evaluation. Yet they arrive at the same building blocks: testing benefits against the original promise, criteria set in advance, action-oriented lessons — and independent validation.
Of those four building blocks, the last is the hardest to organise in practice. A project lead can set criteria alone. A project lead can tally up benefits alone. But judging yourself independently is, by definition, impossible — that always requires a second party.
Independent is not an on/off switch
"Independent validation" sounds as if there were only one form: an external auditor who combs through the report. For a three-year, half-a-million-euro project, that is appropriate. For most projects, it is not — and that is exactly why independence is often absent altogether in practice. The only two options project leads see are "hire externally" or "write it yourself," and the second always wins on cost and schedule.
In between lies a whole range of workable forms. A colleague from another team who reads the report against the criteria set in advance, without having been involved in the project themselves. A quality office that does not redo the whole project, but checks whether the conclusions match the underlying figures. A standing second reader within the organisation, appointed before the project starts — not sought out afterwards once the report was already finished.
Which form fits depends on the risk and the size of the project — a two-month pilot does not call for the same scrutiny as a multi-year IT programme. What matters is not the weight of the form, but that the choice is made deliberately, not skipped because it seems like too much trouble.
What the programme manager in Twente could have done
In the hospital merger, no one had decided in advance who would review the report. By the time the report was ready, there was no time left: the board wanted the document for the next meeting, and finding a second reader would have cost a week that did not exist. Independence was not lost to unwillingness, but to scheduling — exactly the moment when no one is inclined to add an extra step.
That can be prevented by choosing the form of independent review at the moment the evaluation criteria are set, at the start of the project, not at its close. Who will review the report is then already fixed before there is anything to review. That does not have to be an auditor. It has to be someone who was not themselves responsible for the outcome.
One step
For the next evaluation, decide in advance who will check the report against the criteria — not who writes it, but who reads it before it goes out the door. That does not cost an auditor. It costs a name on paper, before the project begins.