How I Used Surveys to Drive Project Engagement - P1

[Uncle Rob]

EPISODE 1 - IF KOOLAID IS THERE, DRINK IT

People, Process, & Tools.   The so called trinity of success that makes no sense at all.   Process and Tools are metaphors for people's attention, participation, utilization, and acceptance of your given initiative.   People are the only real part of a services engagement.   Those of us who've lived through implementation(s) as a customer, were lucky to get "engagement" on a project at all, but when we did, it too often suffered common limitations

• Engagement managers aren't technical and don't engage the end users of the product
• Engagement managers are perceived to only interact with senior customer leadership, as an ancillary for the PM
• Engagement is not quantified.

Not making judgments or pointing fingers.   I've struggled for years myself looking for good solutions to the problem.   Only recently did I take tangible steps, experimenting with ways to solve the problems of engagement with actual users in a quantified manner.   Taking an inventory of what the platform could provide for free (no extra modules beyond base licensing, and no custom apps), I decided to start with Surveys.   This series will follow my experiences and lessons learned, and I hope ti gives you ideas on how you can engage in a more quantified way with the actual users of your product.

My thoughts going in:

• I didn't think hard about execution.   I wanted to experience Surveys way any creator would with no experience, training, or process
• Survey questions should be relevant to the high level objectives of the project
• Capturing "feeling" is particularly important among the users of the product, since we'll depend on them to actually use.
• Use the survey as a Trojan Horse to discover new requirements or gather volunteers.

Lessons Learned So Far

• I wish I had done this earlier, and gauged feelings on the current tool.   This would have been a great side-by-side comparison
• People love the idea of being asked their opinion, but you still have to goad them to do it.
• Its interesting seeing the gaps between senior staff views of "what matters" vs non-senior
• Setting up Surveys is easier than ever.   Interacting with Survey results is still really frustrating.
• "BTW, this survey has been delivered via the ServiceNow platform" - I'll never get tired of the look on their faces
• Coming up with questions that generate actionable insight takes some real time and effort.

More to come so stay tuned.

Episode 2

Episode 3