At this point in the agency assessment process, you should be able to use the information you have gathered and analyzed to help you determine your strengths and weaknesses. If you don’t have enough information, or if there are gaps in your analysis, you may need to gather further data to fill those gaps. The information you collected and your analysis should begin to help you identify what areas of programming are bringing you the greatest successes (the vital few) and areas where there is room for improvement.

When thinking about your strengths and weaknesses and what outcomes you will want to improve, here are some questions to ask yourself. Who is our client group (our learners) and what do they need from us? How do we currently help them meet those needs? What gaps are there and how might we address those gaps? If we can’t help them meet all of their needs, can we refer them to another agency? If so, which one? How do we know that we are successful in helping our learners meet their stated needs? What is the most effective and efficient way to help our learners meet their needs and goals? How can we let our learners, our funders, our community, our referral partners and other stakeholder know about our successes?

Step Three: Improving Results

Looking at the results of what we achieve in our programs is part of CIPMS. But it is not enough to just look at those results; we have to use them to help set next year’s targets, revise expectations and tell people what we do and how we do it. We can use the results to clearly and definitively show the impact we are making and how we contributed to that impact. We can show clients and stakeholders our processes and our CIPMS plan, but all of that just says what we expect and hope will happen. What we really need to tell them is what did happen and why we know that it did, and how we contributed to that. What evidence can we use to answer those questions? Good tracking and documentation can help you do this. Anecdotal evidence is also important because it helps you tell the story.

Northern Connections Adult Learning Centres in Eastern Ontario has developed an excellent CIPMS planning tool that has proven to be very helpful. The tool is based on MTCU’s Program Monitoring Report and clearly lays out what the agency needs to accomplish for each of the criteria and how they will demonstrate that they have met expectations. This document clearly identifies what will be evaluated, how the agency will demonstrate what it has achieved, who will do what activities and when. We have included this document in the Resources and Appendices Section.