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 create questions, you can choose on of four different question types that together cover all your needs for producing questionnaires.

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 convenient 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, questionnaires that have been closed and released are sent by email to participants. Via a link in the email, each participant accesses his/her own questionnaire that can then be completed online.

As long as the answer sheet has not been completely filled in, the participant to the survey will be advised that the questionnaire cannot be submitted yet as complete. It is possible to leave an incomplete answer sheet at any time; after calling up the link the participant will be directed back to the in-progress questionnaire.

Consolidation

The Consolidation menu will list all questionnaires belonging to the project that have been distributed. At the questionnaire level a status is provided with the following information:

Highlights

• Number of invitations n
• Questionnaires started m/n (x%)
• Questionnaires finished m/n (x%)
• A list of participants for this survey with the last access date and completion state

From the Consolidation area, the standard reports are created that can then be viewed in the Reporting menu.

Reports

The report data are created by the report generator instantOLAP that is part of the grade-IT license only for this purpose. A report is created in Excel using the OLAP source as basis, which allows the creation of all sorts of reports for every question using pivot functions.Reported data is created by the report generator using instantOLAP, which is licenzed only as a part of the grade-IT licence.  

For the BIA Questionnaire included in delivery a number of predefined Excel reports will be provided.