Improving your IT services

Step 1 - Painstorming
This step involves collecting, from as many sources as you can, "What I don't like about my IT services is ...". Use a broadcast email to elicit a good response. This is NOT your satisfaction survey, just a step along the way.

Step 2 - Rationalise
and prepare A small team should now review all the responses, and rationalise them - eliminate duplicates, reword where necessary, discard rude ones, etc., resulting in a maximum of 100 issues. Write each one onto a separate card (playing card size) and produce one set of cards for each person in the survey.

Step 3 - Select the survey group
Now you determine who you want to respond (ask someone with some statistical training for guidance on stratification) . Make sure you have a mixture of managers, users, and even IT staff. Don't make response optional. Get a senior manager to direct that the selected staff respond.

Step 4 - conduct the survey
Send the cards to the selected people. They now have to sort them into four piles. Really really important. Very important.  Somewhat important. Not important at all. Bundle them up into their groups and send them to the surveyor.

Step 5 - Score the Survey
Score 16, 8, 4 and 0 for each card in the respective groups. Add up the scores for the total response, and for each group of respondees (managers, users, IT). Rank the issues in levels of concern

Step 6 - Analyse the results and prepare your action plan
This is the fun bit, especially when you see the different perspectives of the different groups.

In Summary
This approach allows you to focus your Improvement Programme on the issues that are really important to your customers, not just on the answers to the questions that we thought of asking.

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