Additional lesson provided by IRM during interdepartmental comments: Cluster TAs such as SIAP have long approval processes due to the need to obtain separate approvals from the Steering Committee as well as ADB management.
Additional lesson provided by IRM during interdepartmental comments: Providing TA support when projects are not in the Blue Book5 and counterparts have not issued commitment letters presents a unique risk that future TA interventions should mitigate.
Additional lesson: Meaningful outcome indicators are consistently, plausibly, and directly linked to desired outcomes.
Procedural requirements such as Steering Committee endorsements and counterpart no_x005F_x0002_objections, can trigger delays and should, therefore, be carefully considered when designing a realistic timeframe for TA implementation.
Importance of demand-driven, timely and targeted knowledge and policy advisory support as advised to ADB by the EA of SIAP with respect to the SIAP TA cluster management facility.
The DMF must include outcomes for each of the output areas, given the diverse and significant nature of the outputs and their contribution to Mongolia’s financial stability. The DMF included outcomes for three of the five output areas, making it difficult to track the TA project’s contributions.
The TA project design and its five outputs were an amalgam of diverse activities. Most of these outputs could easily have been managed under separate TAs. While all the outputs fell within the finance sector, they were combined into one TA project in response to directions from ADB Management and the President that the number of individual TA projects be reduced. While the TA was managed properly overall, the many different counterparts and objectives involved made the oversight process challenging and complex.
Properly designed TA DMFs enables the outcomes and outputs to be clearly attributed to the TA project initiatives. Generalized achievements, or achievements that could have resulted from initiatives or projects being implemented by other organizations concurrently, should be avoided. It is important to define baselines for indicators and factor in expected growth/development when defining indicator targets.
A robust research and consultation conducted during the project planning and design stage ensure that the outcomes, outputs, and TA project activities being proposed are not already being conducted by other donors or even by ADB. Evaluation of initiatives developed for roll-out in other regions where they have proven success supports them being adopted into the new region considering its own characteristics.
A carefully developed TOR for consultants during the project planning and design stage ensure that the contract is set up in a most efficient way.