1. In the context of renewed corporate emphasis on providing evidence and accountability for results under the World Food Programme’s (WFP) Strategic Plan for 2014- 2017 and organisational strengthening endeavours, WFP has committed to increase the evaluation coverage of single operations in complement to the Office of Evaluation’s (OEV) more complex evaluations of policies, strategies, country portfolios and impact of core activities. 2. Consequently, OEV has designed a new approach for Operation Evaluations (OpEv), which foresees outsourcing the management and conduct of these evaluations. Long-term agreements have been established with reputable companies for this purpose and these guidelines, which have been designed to initiate and test this approach, are primarily intended for them. Yet, in publishing them, the intention is also to provide transparency to third parties: WFP colleagues, organisations and institutions affected by WFP evaluations and users of the evaluation results. 3. These guidelines aim to clarify the quality standards for Operation Evaluations in terms of both the evaluation process and products and to provide guidance accordingly. As such, it deals primarily with conceptual and organisational matters rather than with the technicalities of the evaluation research process.