The Assessment Plan

Like the marketing plan, the assessment plan was much easier to construct than the project plan, again because both have a much more limited scope: in this case, did the marketing do its job and is the plan producing its intended results. We also had enough familiarity with the project as a whole and our issues from the previous portions that we knew what questions to ask in advance of beginning the plan, which greatly helped facilitate this process.

Still, a few outcomes needed to be adjusted for precision. The assessment certainly stressed any existing inadequacies from our project and marketing plans, I learned. This makes me wonder, when planning a project “for real” (that is, outside the guidelines of a course) if the assessment plan should be developed alongside or even prior to the other plans, if possible.

Also, there is a point of uncertainty regarding Desk Tracker and how its data is input. The problems of self-reporting have come up in class discussions before, namely that people forget to record reference interactions until well after the fact, if at all, producing a skewed set of data. The virtual reference should not suffer this problem, as any statistics can be traced back to the logs, but walk-in and phone reference may still suffer, even though those two modes of contact are only tertiary to this particular project’s aims.