Person:
Kusek, Jody Zall

Health, Global AIDS Unit, The World Bank
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Health; public sector
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Health, Global AIDS Unit, The World Bank
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Jody Zall Kusek is an expert in Monitoring and Evaluation at the World Bank. During her fifteen years at the World Bank she has held both regional and corporate positions focusing on how the World Bank can better align its resources and investments to achieve development results on the ground.  She has worked in all six regions of the Bank and in over 40 countries helping to improve evidence based decision making through monitoring and evaluation .   She is the co-author of Ten Steps to Results Based Monitoring and Evaluation System, now in its fifth printing and available in seven languages.  This handbook is used by academic institution, national governments, and developing partner’s worldwide to better understand the principles and practices of results based M&E. She also co-authored Making Monitoring and Evaluation Systems Work, published in June 2010. Her most recent book, Fail Safe Management was published in 2013.  Earlier, Ms. Kusek was a senior advisor and director in two cabinet agencies during the Clinton-Gore Administration in the United States, helping to design and implement the Government Performance and Results Act that is the hallmark of the US’s strategic and program planning model. 

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Fail-Safe Management : Five Rules to Avoid Project Failure
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-05) Zall Kusek, Jody; Hamilton, Billy C.
    Project failures are not confined to the development world. In 2004 Hartman and Ashrafi found that the project failure rate is above 60 percent for construction, engineering, and other technology projects, despite all the advances in project management theory and practice. This book's interest, however, is in the very large percentage of projects not subject to events beyond the control of project managers. In this regard, attention to the possibility of failure is the best guarantee of success. Understandably, public managers may be uncomfortable with such an inherently negative approach to managing public projects, which are, after all, designed and intended to produce a public good or to solve a public problem. The point is not to be pessimistic but realistic in managing public projects. Anticipating and solving problems can avert compounding those problems and the failures that result. And this book delivered five rule to avoid project failure: i) make it about the how; ii) keep your champions close but your critics closer; iii) informal networks matter-work with them; iv) unclog the pipes; and v) build the ship as it sails.
  • Publication
    Assessing Country Readiness for Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation to Support Results Informed Budgeting
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-01) Kusek, Jody Zall
    This brief provides an overview of the role of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in informing budgetary decisions and presents one tool: the readiness assessment - that can help determine the M&E capacity and demand present in a country. Case studies on the use of this assessment are included from Egypt, Romania, and a country in East Asia. This assessment tool focuses on collecting baseline information on how well positioned a government is to design, build and sustain a results-based M&E system. It is divided into three sections: incentives; roles and responsibilities; and capacity building. There are 40 questions in the instrument that cluster into eight areas. These questions identify issues at the national, sub-national, or sector-wide levels of government, rather than at the program or project level. The readiness assessment tool seeks to assist individual governments, the donor community, and their multiple development partners also involved in public sector reform to systematically address the requisites (present or not) for a results-based M&E system. With the information garnered from this effort, development partners can help address the challenges inherent in improving on the current system used to track progress towards achieving the results from government action.
  • Publication
    Logged On : Smart Government Solutions from South Asia
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015) Bhatti, Zubair K.; Zall Kusek, Jody; Verheijen, Tony
    Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelation that mobile technology is helping to fight corruption in Pakistan, improve health delivery in Bangladesh, provide access to government by the ordinary citizen in India, and help monitor elections in Afghanistan. If this Is possible in some place in poor South Asian countries considered the most poor in the world, then how can these examples be spread to further in these counties or in other countries? Logged on provides a look back on conventional solutions that have mostly not worked and why mobile solutions are taking hold. The book offers a model called Smart Proactive Government based on a Feedback model being used in Punjab, Pakistan. The book also offers five solutions that are present in every successful mobile and smart phone example that the authors reviewed.