- Involve as many people as possible. Aim for participation from every department and function, and encourage everyone to contribute their opinions.
- Include both line-of-business staff and IT. Technology staff will get a clearer picture of the expectations of their in-the-business counterparts, while the others will better understand the capabilities and limitations of your current IT infrastructure and adjust their expectations accordingly.
- Keep things short. In most cases, there’s no need for more than an hour-and-a-half. If you can’t find out what you need to know at that time, you’re asking too much.
- Be consistent. Conduct each session the same way so you can be sure each participant is working within the same frame of reference.
Identify processes, not procedures. You need to find out about what the organization does, not how it does it. This will make it easier to identify alternative procedures to speed recovery.
Group Meetings With Individual Data Gathering Session
Group Meetings With Individual Data Gathering Session. Sometimes it is not easy to get a good handle on what to work into a design by piecing together individual interviews. Here is another great place to use a large group process. In the large group, you will not hear the brutal, personally focused data that you can in an intimate interview. You will hear themes and priorities. In the large-group setting, you can work the process to gather the data and do the critical analysis essentially in one step. The forum, process, and questions you design will be specific to the situation, but basically, you will ask the people to identify and prioritize what needs to be kept, tossed, and created as they move on into the future. If it is important for understanding and design, you can follow up on the large-group meeting with individual data-gathering sessions. It’s a much more efficient and effective way to go.
Companies collect your data in order to build up your profile, which can be used to push your targeted products and services. This has become big business now as customers are willing to pay a lot of money for such data, which can help them target specific segments of the market.
Data Collection methods include interviews, questionnaires, experiment, observation, sample survey, census, etc that are either personally administered, send through the mail, or electronically administered; observations of individuals and events with or without videotaping or audio recording and a variety of other methods.
Group sessions can be an excellent way to engage staff members and gather information more quickly than one-on-one interviews. Group sessions, like one-on-ones, can also encourage respondents to take more ownership of the results of the BIA.
On the downside, people can often submit to group-think in an effort to appease dominant personalities in a group; you might get more homogenous data or lower-quality answers from group sessions than you would if you did individual interviews.
If you decide to move ahead with group sessions, though, here are some tips to get the most from them:
Group meetings with individual data gathering session.
About the Author
Dr. Jeff Evans
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