End User Feedback in Outsourcing Models - Important or not?

Some outsourcing relationships fail not because the vendor is not good or the deliverables

are not met but because users are not happy with the results of outsourcing. These users create their own little processes or duplicate the work being done by the outsourcing team to take care of the issue inhouse.

In anything we do, we know that if users aren't satisfied to a majority extent, the entire effort becomes wasted. Many companies make technology outsourcing decisions without consultating their internal users. Remember, these are the same users who have to do their job and they need to do it with or without the help of the outsourced provider.

So does your company have an end User Satisfaction Survey which will help you determine if technology outsourcing is working for them?

If not, here is some high-level information that will help you create an end-user satisfaction survey. First determine the criteria which will be used for doing the evaluation. Obviously it needs to be well-defined so that it can be appropriately measured and understood. Some areas for what to evaluate may include:

Ease of use: Is the software easy for the end user to use?

Productivity: Is the software creating productivity or is it adding to the end-users' workload?

Complete: Is theapplication in question complete - meaning does it fulfill all the needs of the tasks a user is supposed to do using it. Or was the software implemented in a rush and the remaining phased deployments never happened which made the application either partially usable or not used.

So then how to measure the feedback provided?

What works best is when you provide users the ability to answer the various questions using the "Agree, strongly agree, don't agree" type of scale.

Also be sure to include an area where users can give open-ended feedback where users have the ability to provide specific examples which can help fix a software problem quickly. It is important that users have the option of submitting the survey response anonymously so as to get high quality feedback.

You may wish to do a survey once or twice a year. Remember software development is done to help users do their job better to meet the needs of the business. To make your outsourcing decision sustainable, get feedback from users and listen to it. Othewise you'll have spent tons of money for nothing because users will find ways to do their job using temporary solutions which may become permanent over time.

End User Feedback in Outsourcing Models - Important or not?

By: Pallavi Barnwal

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