The Project

grade-IT is a tool for authoring and managing questionnaires to perform surveys about Business Impact Analysis, but it may also be used for any kind of survey. Included with grade-IT is a template for a Business Impact Analysis, that can easily be modified or extended. grade-IT is capable of managing and performing multi-language surveys.

To execute a survey, a project needs to be created that contains all necessary questionaries either by creation or copying. A Project contains information about sense, purpose, start, end, the company, the project leader, the to-be-asked organizational unit and the implementing / responsible organizational unit.

Master Data

Master data like e.g. value-definitions, business processes, organizational units that are needed in the questions are managed in the master data menu. Master Data defined in alive-IT can, starting with version 1.0, be used in grade-IT.

Questionnaires

A questionnaire can be structured by chapters that can contain any numbers of questions. To author questions without further wishes there are four kinds of question types.

The following question types may be used:

Highlights

• Free text
• Numeric
• Single- or multichoice
• Two- and multidimensional Matrix

Especially using the matrix type is a very convinient way to create complex questions in a compact table. A questions answer may be used in later questions as a dimension in a request matrix.

Answering a question may depend on answers made in earlier questions. If the precondition is met, the question is to be answered, otherwise the question is skipped.

Answering

To answer the BIA the previously finished and shared questionnaires are sent to the participants by email. Using a hyperlink in that email the participant gets access to his/her questionnaire, that must be filled in online.

As long as the questionnaire is not filled out completely, the participant gets informed and the questionnaire may not be finished with its state set to answered. Leaving an incomplete survey is possible at all times, using the link again will take the participant back to his already processed questionnaire.

Consolidation

In the menu palette Consolidation are all projects' and sent questionnaires. At the questionnaires' level the state is shown, which contains the following information:

Highlights

• Number of invitations n
• Questionnaires started m/n (x%)
• Questionnaires finished m/n (x%)
• List of users invited to the survey incl. the most recent access time and the finished-state

Using the consolidation to create standardized reports makes them avaliable in the menu palette Reports.

Reports

Reported data is created by the report generator using instantOLAP, which is licenzed only as a part of the grade-IT licence. A report is generated in MS Excel by using OLAP as the basis and creating any desired report with the Pivot-function for any question.

Some default reports are shipped with the included BIA questionnaire, ready to use as a template in MS Excel.