There a lot of survey methods but I will cover only three.
- Traditional paper,
- Direct e-mail
- Web based survey with e-mail invitations
2.1 Traditional paper
This is useful in situations where you have the respondents available or even “captive”. I usually give out feedback forms after training sessions and tell people to fill the forms, please. Then I wait in silence. In this class room situation students are used to do what the trainer tells and one gets usually 90-100% response rate. Customers in a restaurant might be a similar group.
If you do not have the customers available, a private letter to your customers may work better than e-mail. A lot of people get tons of direct marketing by e-mail and paper but private letters get opened. Hand written mail might work also.
The survey form is one page long.
If the group is captive, put the basic info on the form, do not make the respondents write the place or date. Otherwise put some id on the form unless anonymity is necessary. Usually I do this quite openly by pre-filling the contact info on the form. Anonymity is overvalued and generally unnecessary.
I have Word documents where I update the class info. It is usually just the class name and number. For example ITILF 0907, which means the 7th Itil Foundation class in 2009.
Course ID: ITILF 0907
What is your overall evaluation?
| The course was excellent and I can recommend it. | The course was good. | I am not completely satisfied with the course | The course was bad. | ||||
| What was good in the course? |
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| What could be improved? |
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Notice that I have split each box of the 4-scale scale into two so it has become an 8-scale. There is no explanation as the trainer can explain it while people are answering.
2.2 Direct e-mail
By direct e-mail I mean a survey where the questions are in the e-mail itself and the respondent is asked to reply by replying to the e-mail. This method was actually the main reason behind the invention of the 3QSM.
In this method you write a short e-mail with one to three questions like this:
Hi John I have three questions concerning cooperation and itil processes. The questions are in the form of arguments. Write your answer on the lines after the question number. 1 means you strongly disagree, 5 means you strongly agree
Best Regards Aale Roos |
2.3 Web based survey with e-mail invitations
This is the most popular method. I’m not a great fan but I use it. The good thing is that you can structure the questions, which is sometimes useful. Here is an example of trying to find out how much time people are using to try to solve incidents.
How much time you have used trying to solve the issue by using different methods?
| did not use this method | 1-5 min | 5-15 min | 15-30 min | 30-60 min | 1-2 hours | more | |
| by calling to Service Desk | |||||||
| trying to solve it myself | |||||||
| using self help tools | |||||||
| asking a colleague | |||||||
| asking application support | |||||||
| asking someone else |
In fact, the question above contains six questions but don’t let that bother you. Sometimes you have to break rules.
