01 · Examine
What does the record show?
Service delivery, participation, costs, outcomes where available, and the experience of staff and people using the service.
For public agencies
Evidence you can examine before the decision is made.
Budget, program, and policy decisions run on real calendars. Prova helps your team examine what existing evidence can responsibly support, what remains uncertain, and what further inquiry would be useful while the decision is still open.
Begin with the decision, its deadline, and the service people depend on.
Recognizable situations
The decision has a date. The service has to keep running.
- 01
A budget, renewal, or reauthorization decision will arrive before a longer evaluation can report.
- 02
Administrative records show who received a service, but leave an important outcome or equity question open.
- 03
A program needs to adapt while people continue to depend on it.
- 04
A proposed evaluation or public claim needs a careful examination before you commit to it.
A useful answer within reach
Start with the record. Be precise about what it can carry.
Your records may have been created to run services, account for spending, or meet reporting requirements. Reading them together can help answer questions that no single report addresses. Prova reads across the material, connects conclusions to their sources, and distinguishes delivery, observed change, and evidence of a program’s contribution.
Illustrative question — not client work
Should this service be renewed?
A renewal decision needs a clear account of what is known, what remains open, and what can be learned in time.
02 · Qualify
What does it leave unresolved?
Missing experiences, uneven coverage, changing conditions, whether an observed change can be attributed to the program, who produced the figures, how they were checked, and whether the producer has a stake in the decision.
03 · Decide
What could change the next step?
What can be answered in time for renewal, and what needs longer investigation.
See a Decision & Options Brief for an illustrative service renewal
Inspect a worked example using a constructed nonprofit record
Questions Prova can help answer
Fit the work to the public decision.
The question, available records, permissions, and deadline determine the scope. A short inquiry may clarify a claim or a design; some outcome questions need a longer evaluation.
What can we say before the decision?
- Read across administrative records, evaluations, research, and operational knowledge
- Separate supported findings from assumptions and unanswered questions
Evidence synthesis and claim checking
What needs to change in the service?
- Examine the program logic and where delivery departs from it
- Consider whose experience is missing from the current account
Program evaluation and improvement
What is worth learning as delivery continues?
- Design measurement around the decisions it must serve
- Assess feasible comparisons and the burden of collecting more information
Evaluation and measurement design
Will this analysis withstand examination?
- Review a defined design, analysis, report, or consequential claim
- Make assumptions, limitations, and the reviewer's role explicit
Independent review
Public responsibility
Evidence informs public judgment. It does not replace it.
A program’s purpose cannot always be reduced to what is easiest to count. Rights, dignity, service continuity, and the experience of people affected retain their standing. Accountable public institutions decide how evidence bears on those responsibilities.
Agree the conditions before the work begins
Make the mandate, information boundaries, and intended use clear.
- 01
Name the decision and the people it affects.
Establish who commissions the work, who will use it, whose experience should inform it, and how findings will be examined or challenged.
- 02
Confirm what information may be used.
Agree access, permitted uses, retention, and sharing through the agency's procurement and data-governance processes. Discuss publication and disclosure requirements before transferring records.
- 03
Choose the role the question requires.
Prova can help develop the work or independently review work it did not create. If Prova helped build or substantially revise it, a later judgment should not be presented as independent.
Method and responsibility
More of the record examined. A person responsible for the conclusion.
AI assists with reading, comparison, and synthesis. Consequential judgments remain with accountable people, connected to sources and explicit about uncertainty.
A practical first step
Bring the decision and the date it needs to inform.
We can establish the smallest useful scope, whether the timeline is feasible, and what approvals or information would be needed to begin.
Discuss a public decision