TOR104: DevResults with Herb Caudill

How do you go about monitoring and tracking the work that you've accomplished as an implementer of humanitarian aid or development assistance? This question has been answered 1000s of times by 100s of organizations around the world.

Even though we're in the year 2016, the reality of tracking progress for the vast majority of initiatives out there is one of two things: written reports in Microsoft Word or numbers on an Excel spreadsheet.... that then get translated into a narrative report in Word. I'm not kidding. I've been evaluating programming in this world for more than 10 years and I have yet to be hired for an assignment where, as a first step, my client sends me a username and password for their online information management that has the ability to instantly report on total program progress with a complete package of visualization and analytical tools.
This isn't to say this doesn't exist: in fact, when I first cut my teeth in development with a large NGO back in the early 2000s, they already had built an internal, web based monitoring system. And I've seen a bunch of flavors of the same type of thing in organizations around the globe. For some reason, even though there have been countless attempts at making this process better, at the project level, we still revert back to spreadsheets and reports.
Herb Caudill is on a mission to change all of that. As my guest today for the 104th episode of Terms of Reference, the founder of DevResults thinks we might finally be at a stage where data, connectivity and capacity are all at levels that real time project analysis and management is possible.

Herb loves to make elegant and efficient systems that solve real-world problems. He is a data-visualization geek, a graphic designer, and a programmer, he started out building websites and software for international development organizations, including USAID, the World Bank, GIZ, DFID, the World Resources Institute, and Chemonics International. Herb grew up in Latin America and worked in Africa for 5 years, first teaching high-school math with the Peace Corps and then working on internet connectivity initiatives with USAID.