Needs, Needs Assessment, and Evaluation: Related Yet Different

This concept is so vital to successful planning and performance improvement, it is covered in Chapter 9. Needs assessments are proactive before-the-fact determination of gaps while evaluations identify gaps in results after an intervention, program, or activity.

The basis for useful results and consequences are essential for Mega Thinking and Planning. The basis for planning serves as the criteria for design, development, implementation, evaluation, and continual improvement. It is vital that everything any organization uses, does, produces, and delivers is driven by valid results. And these results are derived from a valid and appropriate needs assessment.

The use of rigorous and useful tools for determining needs and objectives will be vital in dealing with change, choices, and consequence.

Needs assessments are the bases for establishing validating goals and objectives based on performance data. Because they are based on the gaps in results and the costs to meet the needs as compared to the costs to ignore them, a needs assessment allows one to identify and justify any objectives. Rather than relying on judgment, intuition, precedents or authority, needs assessments provide the direction and justification for the following:

1.   where you are headed

2.   justification, based on data, of why you want to get there

3.   how you know when you have arrived (performance criteria for evaluation and continual improvement)

Providing such performance data is not only sensible, but it is safe—a good basis for making good choices and making decisions.

How your organization goes about planning using needs assessment. Following are some considerations for you and your organization to calibrate how you go about planning (and the implications for the basic concepts of Mega Thinking and Planning).¹¹ For each item, identify your current use of needs assessment and what you should be doing. This form may be used with others in your organization to obtain both insights and agreement.

* Sometimes our external clients have clients themselves. Include these links in your response.

These needs assessment-related statements should serve you and your associates as a checklist for doing and using needs assessments as a basis for Mega Thinking and Planning.

Start the dialog about useful planning and use the Six Critical Success Factors (Table 4.1) to guide you. You can get a calibration of “What Is” and “What Should Be” concerning conducting a needs assessment from the responses by yourself and, ideally, other key people associated with your organization.

Needs assessment. It has already been noted that when one does a useful needs assessment

•   needs are defined as gaps in results, not gaps in resources (Inputs) or processes/activities/solutions (Processes);

•   there are three levels of results—the Mega, Macro, and Micro levels—and thus there are three levels of needs assessment;

•   needs are linking among the three levels of planning and results; and

•   a quasi need is a gap, but not a gap in results; they are gaps in Inputs or Processes.

When identifying needs (as, of course, gaps in results) they are best in Interval or Ratio scale terms (see Table 5.1). The more precise and rigorous you can sensibly be, the better your chances of getting useful results.

Hard and soft data. There are two kinds of data to be collected. Both are important and useful:

Hard data can be collected in many ways and from many sources. We can go to organizational records and public records. We can get data on sales, returns, production rates and rejects, absences, complaints, etc. There is a lot more data available from public and internal sources than most people at first realize.

Soft data may be collected with questionnaires, inventories, interviews, and meetings.