Performance Evaluation Survey
The premier educational, technological and peer-interaction resource in the meeting industry
needed to improve its manual procedure for gathering feedback on group members from each member's peers. The
company would spend hundreds of hours using a word processor and/or Excel to generate (cut/copy/paste) evaluation forms
for each member of every group being evaluated.
Such a procedure was plagued by a handful of problems
It was difficult to know if every evaluation form had the correct people, titles and presentation order.
It was possible that inconsistencies could slip in to the evaluation forms such as wrong titles or mispellings.
Verifying that every member received and returned the appropriate forms was a tedious manual process.
If information needed to be changed such as a new affiliation or a name change, all evaluations would have to be manually regenerated.
Appointments to boards and committees ran staggered for two or three year terms. This lead to confusion about who remains on the board as the years pass.
Results were summarized manually using a calculator, thus human error can occur.
All reports were generated and maintained manually using a word processor/Excel so more human error can occur.
The application developed to replace the manual process required that all existing membership information be translated to a database.
With this information managed in a database, intuitive management of members and their appointments was provided. Evaluation forms were
generated specific to each member of a group. Information contained within the database could be edited and reviewed for ease of
maintenance. The data could be filtered by numerous methods (date, committee, title, member) depending on the tasks being performed.
The completed application was well received and drastically improved the process accuracy and productivity.
The benefits of developing this application were numerous
The membership participation roster can remain current. The tracking of members across the staggered terms is handled programmatically, so the confusion about who remains on the board has been alleviated.
Consistency of committee names, titles, name spellings and affiliations across all groups/members.
Adjustments can be made to users and affiliations and regenerated as a printed report with minimal effort.
Tracking of completed and outstanding evaluation forms was available for follow up handling.
Summarized results are programmatically computed removing the possibility of human error.
Forms can be regenerated at any time to accomodate lost forms or verification printouts of entered results.
All reports are generated programmatically. This has drastically improved performance, ease of use and consistency.
Data is maintained in a database which opens up the possibility of linking this information to other existing and planned applications.
The application was developed with Visual Basic utilizing an ACCESS/97 database. The application provides simultaneous database
access to multiple LAN based users.