Example surveys for customer satisfaction / team satisfaction

[Greg Montgomery]

I've seen a couple articles (e.g. http://scrumorlando09.pbworks.com/Scrum-Metrics-and-Myths)
discussing agile metrics that talked about using surveys for two
purposes

1) Customer satisfaction survey. Focused on your customer(s) and
stakeholders, the goal is to measure how successful the scrum team is
in meeting the business needs.

2) Team satisfaction survey. This is focused on the scrum team and is
meant to gain an understanding of how the team is performing. Are
people happy, working well together, etc.

Both of these surveys sounded like good ideas and I wanted to see if
others have experience using these and was it worthwhile. I was also
trying to find some sample/template survey questions but haven't found
any, which makes me wonder if this is really used very much.

Thanks

[scott.duncan]

I might guess that the former is handled through the end of iteration
revewis/demos and the close interaction between customer and team
during the iteration while the latter is covered through
retrospectives. That is, assuming both of these are occurring and
being handled effectively. If not, surveys aren't going to be of much
benefit. If they are, surveys don't seem to me to be required.

On Aug 18, 9:26 am, Greg Montgomery <g...@montgomeryhouse.net> wrote:
> I've seen a couple articles (e.g.http://scrumorlando09.pbworks.com/Scrum-Metrics-and-Myths)

[David M Babuder]

I think surveys conducted anonymously do provide feedback that can be useful, in that it can tell you if the vocal folks at the meetings really represent the whole audience, or if some audience members are grumbling silently (or if they are cheering silently and a few grumblers are the noisy ones)

I wouldn't put a large amount of effort into the surveys in terms of detailed questions, since you are basically just looking to see if the feedback is consistent with the process information -- and its only useful
(a) if you get a high % of surveys back and
(b) you take some action based on the surveys so that people know that their time was well spent on the survey.  Even if the action is 'x% took the survey, y% think we are 'blah blah and blah' therefore the Scrum feedback process seems to be working (or not working).

[Tom Reynolds]

I ran one survey with a team I worked with when we were at the end of
the project and the team were to be split up. All of the people on
the team were new to scrum when they started the project.

The survey consisted of 7 questions and each could be answered by
ticking a box. The basis of my survey was to gather opinion from the
team on how well they thought scrum worked, would they recommend it to
others, was it better for collaboration, productivity, ownership etc.
In my case everyone responded and the response was very much
favourable. Although all of the answers could be given by tick boxes
I founnd that people also supplemented theor answers with written
text.

I conducted the survey anomously as I didnt want people to anwser
based on the thought of any comeback, even though I did state that
wasnt the intention but I was after a more honest response than one
that may have been clouded.

There is a good chapter on this in Mike Cohn's succeeding with agile
book.

Tom

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[Hans]

Surveys can be useful, but like all data, you have to understand why
you are asking the question. For teams we've found some surveys
useful in certain situations. We've had teams where the perception is
that they are always in "storming" and the Scrum Master wanted to
create an environment where the "why" could be discussed without too
much emotional baggage. Using the survey at
http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/pi/0809_Tuckman_Team_Work_Survey.pdf ,
given to each team member to fill in, allowed the discussion to be
about why team member's perceptions were different, and also offered
guidance (by at why they weren't able to answer the "performing"
questions more positively) on how to improve. In a similar way, when
teams feel like they are not heading in the right direction with their
Scrum work, we've used the ScrumButt survey to help people understand
both where they are and what they might like to try.

If you are asking from an organizational perspective, we have run an
anonymous survey to all team members as we rolled out Scrum. Idea is
to get feedback on what people were thinking and what areas we needed
to focus on as we rolled out Scrum to a traditional development shop.
The questions we asked were based on those that came from Yahoo
(http://www.controlchaos.com/storage/scrum-articles/
YahooAgileRollout.pdf) with some modifications. We ran these surveys
every six months for about 2 1/2 years. Result was very useful
especially when we fed the results back to the teams. People were
very interested in what other people were thinking.

Hope this helps.

Hans