Surveys with Sharepoint (maybe)

[John]

I'm considering how best to approach a rating system or survey for projects.
I've been asked by my boss to gather information on doing a project rating
system when the project is over. For instance, rate the project on a scale
of 1 - 5 with whether the project was within 5% of the budget, 10% of the
budget, etc. Other questions include the same scale for effort (work hours)
and schedule.

My question is would it be easier to use Enterprise Outline Codes or a
Sharepoint survey for this purpose? If I use a Sharepoint Survey, can I
aggregate information across projects? One of the things I want to do is be
able to group all the information together and come up with aggregate
summaries (like year end reporting on how we did). An example of this
report might show that 60% of our projects were within 10% of their budgets,
and within 10% of the baselined work effort estimate.

I hope this is easy enough to understand. Thanks for your help.

John

 

[Rod Gill]

Hi,

Your problem is that simple metrics like that have little bearing on
reality!! I know of many projects that were a great success but were
over-budget and late. I also know of projects that were on time and $ but
failed! You need to look at business added value actually delivered as the
most important measure but different projects will have different success
criteria. Consequently you will really struggle to come up with a complete
picture across all projects using the same set of measures. You can probably
get down to 7 key measures, but they will be subjective in part and
responses will vary by individual (and company politics!) so one project may
look more successful than another, but not be.

Cost and time measures should be retrievable from Project, so why the need
for a survey?

 

[Marc Soester]

Hi John,

Rod is quite right, you (or your boss) should not forget that surveys are
perseptive, but business process asside, from a technical point of view, my
guttfeeling tells me that you want to use Surveys.

There are multiple ways you can do that:
1. Use Project Workspace Survey:
- Benefit = it is contained within the Project Workspace
- Disadvatage= you will need to write a report in reporting service ( or
other reporting tool) to get an agregated view of all Surveys

2. Use an "overall" Survey and create a new TAB in PWA to make this Survey
available to all users. ( I would use the Public Document Workspace )
- Benefit = you can easely create an overall view of all surveys either
within a WSS view or by exporting it to excel.
- disadvatage = Surveys are not contained within Projects, BUT you can let
users chose a Project name, so that you know that this survery what for this
Project.

I hope this helps

 

[John]

I appreciate both of your responses. We, in fact, are already using Earned
Value to measure the cost and time performance of a project. We are
planning on using the EVM and surveys as part of a more comprehensive way of
measuring and rating project performance.

Thanks for your responses. I will give them careful consideration.

John