Drug Court Program Monitoring and Process Evaluations I. Drug Court Program Monitoring and Process Evaluations Program monitoring is closely related to evaluation, but it is not the same thing.
Monitoring is fundamentally a management activity.
Effective leaders of a program monitor the program's operations to ensure that the program stays on course and that operational procedures are revised if necessary. Monitoring data should enable program managers to describe the scope of the program and its major activities, assess operations and performance in relation to goals, identify potential problems and make any necessary changes, and use available resources effectively. To answer these types of questions, drug courts must maintain or have ready access to a considerable amount of information about individuals and must be able to aggregate relevant data in appropriate categories at reasonably frequent intervals. They should also be able to generate ad hoc reports that provide relevant information on all of the topics listed above and many others as well. Unfortunately, that is not generally the case.