How Do We Know It Has Worked?

Evaluating how well your project does what it set out to do is important not only for measuring its success but also to make sure that the facilities that you have developed remain fit for purpose as needs change. It is the ability to meet expressed needs that should drive the project evaluation. Ideally your pre-project work to define what facilities were needed and how they would work will have done some analysis of the requirements for the new space that you developed. These requirements will give you an idea of what success might look like. It makes sense, therefore, in a post occupancy evaluation to consider using some of the tools that were used for the development of the project in the first place.

You also need to consider what sort of evidence can help you manage, develop, and change the use of the space over time. Clearly some of this will be quantitative - measures of levels of use etc - and some will be qualitative - how people feel about the space for example.

The first port of call for evaluation data should be data collection activities that are already taking place in the institution. Library-based projects, for example, may well have data readily available from before and after the project as libraries typically collect large amounts of user data. Similarly several universities and colleges have ongoing Student Evaluation Projects, and if yours does then the data and opinions collected here will be very helpful especially as these data collection departments usually operate independently of the space and service provider. This data tends to be quantitative and you will need to think about how you can add a qualitative dimension so that you get as full a picture as possible about the space is working.