Using DHIS2 to track non-numeric goals or deliverables

Hello,
Is anyone using DHIS2 to track progress toward non-numeric goals or action plans over time? DHIS2 is obviously great for tracking numeric data and progress toward targets, but it’s not a task management or project management tool. (I’m asked for this even though airtable exists…) I’m trying to think if there’s a creative way, for example, if a community creates its own set of non-standard goals and each month updates on the progress, how would you collect and visualize that? Could the community group be the tracked entity, and there’s a program stage for each milestone for each goal? Or perhaps the community groups are in the OU hierarchy and the goals/deliverables are the tracked entities? I think the analysis would be inconsistent and messy, but I’m having trouble thinking of a better way.

Or if you wanted to track the status of a project deliverable over time. Is there an option other than an aggregate form with check boxes (deliverable 1 completed, yes/no) and then a month by month of which deliverables are completed when?

Thanks for any ideas or discussion on the topic.
~Natalie

Hi Natalie, some questions come to mind:

What does success / completion look like?
Do you want to record progress towards completion?
Do you want to be able to score output based on progress, timeframes or results?
What I would do is define those parameters first and see if there’s a way you could quantify results if you want to compare performance across deliverables (e.g. score 3 for completion within x weeks of deadline, score 2 for completion by deadline, score 1 for completion but only after deadline, score 0 for non-completion). If it’s a simple case of complete or not complete then a boolean operator would probably be fine. Timeframe would also need to be born in mind.
Do you have an example or two to share?

Thanks, this is very helpful! I think it would work to allow them to put in free text for Goal 1, Goal 2, Goal 3 (etc) because we want the communities themselves to be tracking it in a way thats helpful to them. But then standardize the progress metrics so we can pull together the number of communities at which place at different time points. Thanks for the input!

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