8 Nov 2026
Ask a project team when they last changed a plan because of an indicator, and the answer is often a silence. The results framework exists: it was negotiated with the funding partner, its matrix runs to several pages, and the annual report fills it in faithfully. But it does not inform anything that happens between two reports.
The problem is rarely technical. It comes from how indicators are chosen, who owns them and when they are looked at.
Too many indicators, chosen for the wrong reader
A framework written to convince a funder tends to list everything that can be counted. The result is long, and most of it measures activities: workshops held, people trained, documents produced. Those numbers say the team was busy, not whether anything changed. A manager who has to decide where to put next quarter’s effort needs a handful of indicators that track the change the project is meant to produce.
Practical rule: for each indicator, name the decision it is supposed to inform. If none comes to mind, it belongs in an annex, not in the steering pack.
Indicators without owners
An indicator that belongs to the monitoring and evaluation unit alone is rarely used by anyone else. Each indicator needs an owner among the managers whose work it reflects, someone who will explain a bad result and propose what to do about it. The M&E unit organises the data; the owner answers for it.
Baselines and targets nobody believes
Targets set in a hurry during project preparation, without a reliable baseline, lose credibility at the first review. When the baseline is missing, it is better to say so, measure it in the first months and revise the target openly than to defend a number everyone knows is arbitrary.
The review that changes plans
Indicators become useful when they are discussed at a fixed time, by the people who can act on them, with a short list of questions: what moved, why, and what do we do now? A quarterly review of thirty minutes, built around the few indicators that are off track, does more than a long annual report.
A scenario to illustrate
Fictional scenario, written for teaching purposes. A vocational training program tracks forty indicators, most of them counts of sessions and participants. Each year the report shows targets met, while employers keep saying graduates lack practical skills. The team reduces the steering pack to six indicators, including the share of trainees placed in a company internship and employer feedback collected after each internship. Each indicator gets an owner. At the first quarterly review, the placement indicator is clearly behind in two regions, and the team decides to move part of the budget from classroom sessions to company partnerships there. The decision would not have been visible in the old framework.
Six questions to test your framework
- Which decision does each indicator inform, and who takes it?
- How many indicators measure change rather than activity?
- Does every indicator have a named owner outside the M&E unit?
- Are baselines measured, or assumed?
- When were targets last revised, and was it done openly?
- When did a review last lead to a change of plan?
To go further
Our programs Performance indicators that support decisions and Designing a monitoring and evaluation system work on participants’ own frameworks. Our evidence and evaluation support can also help review a framework before a mid-term review.