For many of us it is budget season and time to decide how and where we will spend our money next year. Sadly, too many places, especially resource strapped organizations simply take last year's budget and modify it by a percent or two. But there is no excuse for just letting it ride. If you want to achieve your mission you need to take the time to periodically review the effectiveness of your programs. Do you programs support your strategy? Does your Balanced Scorecard or strategy management system reveal the impact of the programs? Or are there corrective actions that are required?

Here are a few thoughts on how to evaluate your key programs:

1.Does your program align with the strategy? Take a look at your strategy map or a logic model. Ask yourself where the program has the most impact on the strategy. You would not expect the impact to be broad rather a few key areas where it propels the strategy forward. If you cannot find any areas of impact you must discontinue the program

2. Is your program having impact? How you approach answering this question depends upon the nature of your mission-driven organization. But you should take the time to figure out who the program is striving to help and survey that population. If you are focused on teacher effectiveness, survey teachers. If you are a foundation supporting local charities survey local charities. And so on. Perhaps you cannot get to the ultimate beneficiary so you might have to go through your version of a "channel partner". Try to gain some insight as to how your program is helping you perform against your key strategic measures.

3. Is the program managed well? No amount of good intent makes our efforts matter. We have to plan, measure and manage if we are to achieve results. Go to your staff – they will tell you if you are managing your programs well. Do they know the purpose? Do they review performance results? Do they have a venue to identify corrective actions?

The single most important element to ensuring strategic alignment and expected mission impact is to conduct your program evaluation with the intention of learning. If you set out to expose and punish you will get nothing. If you seek to learn you will do just that – learn how to make your strategy happen and make strategy management an ongoing discipline within your organization.