Gather Feedback Across Your Organization
Identify users for the future program.
Starter Questions
Do you know what to focus on first when it comes to creating a quality program?
What does “quality” mean to your employees?
How will your business case make everyone’s jobs easier?
Identifying Users
As we previously identified stakeholder departments and executive Mobilizers, you’ll need to identify future users of the new quality program, or those impacted by the enhancement of an existing one.
Project Managers
Superintendents
Directors of Construction
Field Leaders
Estimators
Project Architects
Other Potential Users (specific to your organization)
The concerns of your executives are critical, but they must be validated against the concerns of program users. When you present the final business case for approval, you will need data to either back up their concerns and resolve them, or constructively discuss why their concerns are not reality on the project site.
Sample Size
The actions outlined in your business case are the solutions that resolve employee concerns. Developing the correct actions within the context of your organization requires that you interview enough team members to identify key trends across a broad demographic. If you interview too few, the loudest voices and strongest opinions will have an unbalanced influence on your business case. Your sample size is sufficient when trends start to emerge from the data and you have a broad demographic.
Geography (Region, Market)
Product Type / Sector (Healthcare, Data Centers, Industrial, Retail, Others)
Role (Project Manager, Superintendent, Director of Construction, Vice President, Field Leader, Project / Field Engineer, Other)
Tenure
Within my own 1,700-person organization, I interviewed 298 team members. I could have completed this effort at 200 – the trending issues had revealed themselves by then – but I didn’t have a broad demographic and needed to include more employees of varying tenure.
Sample Questions
If you’re at an organization with no quality program, you can use the following questions as a starting point for your discussions:
How would a quality program make your job easier?
What do you think a quality program should look like?
How would you structure it?
What tools are we missing?
How do you manage quality now without an established corporate program?
If you’re at an organization that has a quality program in place but needs a renewed focus or enhancement, you can use the following questions to guide you:
How familiar are you with the current quality process?
Is the current program used on your projects?
What does quality mean to you?
What changes would you make to the current program?
In either situation, you should close with: “Who should I talk to next to have a similar conversation?” This question helps you connect with others in the organization, creating a support network that will help you later when it’s time to implement your business case.
Interview and Data Analysis Strategy
Below a few suggestions to improve your effectiveness.
Ask your supervisor for a temporarily lighter workload. Gathering feedback from a diverse audience is a full-time job. You need time for conducting the interviews, and just as much time for analyzing the resulting information. It took me 3 months to interview 298 people.
Schedule separate time blocks for interviewing and thinking. I leveraged Cal Newport’s ideas from Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted Work, scheduling team member interviews in the mornings, leaving my afternoons open to analyze the data from that day’s discussions. This allowed me to stay on top of the data analysis (forthcoming in Part 4) without getting bogged down while preventing distractions and context shifting.
Include your interview context and questions in the meeting invite itself. I had two sections in the invite: Context, where I stated why I was conducting this interview (to hear their ideas on how we could make our program more effective) and Agenda, where I listed the questions I intended to ask them.
Send a separate email to the attendee with the agenda, noting that it is for the upcoming discussion. You’ll encounter employees who accept the invite without looking at its contents, arriving unprepared.
Send the invite and email at least 2 weeks in advance. You want your attendees to prepare for the discussion.
Schedule the discussion for 30 minutes maximum. You must be effective with your time. If you're having a meaningful discussion and 30 minutes is not enough, schedule a second interview to continue.
Keep each discussion one-on-one. Do not interview a group, as tempting as this will be. This prevents groupthink, allowing you to dig deep with each team member. (“Tell me more about that.”)
Be transparent. Inform the attendee that the discussion is a “safe place” and that you’re asking for their genuine thoughts and feelings on quality. You’ll be sharing their titles and commentary with executives, but not their names.
Follow the conversational cycle of listening, thinking, and asking questions. You are the listener. These interviews are not the opportunity for you to tell others what you think the program should look like. Your opinion is important, but it cannot serve as the primary basis for your quality business case.
Feedback Goals
Your business case needs to streamline the hardest roles. This isn’t to say that one person’s job is “harder” than another – all roles in our industry are equally difficult. Think about what roles on your list have the most responsibility, and what associated workloads can be streamlined or simplified. By specifically streamlining the work of program users, you’ll attain their buy-in, as well as the buy-in of your executives, making your implementation (forthcoming in Part 6) more successful.