Knowledge management 08: A questionnaire for the survey of customers’ opinion about design services

Questionnaire Areas of Focus: Customers. Values / strategic goals: Customer’s satisfaction in relation to the final product Values/ strategic goals: Create personal contacts / Customers as partners.
	Engineering / Technical	Value for money	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
Creative/ artistic		Quality of product/	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
		Originality	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
		Elegance	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
	Communication	Collaboration	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
		Understanding you needs	very negative	negative	neutral	positive	very positive
A hypothetical questionnaire for the survey of customer’s satisfaction.

Unfortunately, customers can mostly appraise the final products, disregarding any preceding efforts, experimentations and failures. Moreover, since customers are asked through a simplistic questionnaire, to evaluate vague concepts like “originality” and “elegance’, a high degree of subjectivity and several misunderstandings should be expected.

An open-ended questionnaire for the survey of insider’s opinion about an architecture firm/ design office.

In a large architecture firm, with a flexible and open scheme, the typical measurements like the average age of employees or the numbers of certifications would not be very illuminating. Therefore, a suitable method for the tracking of the individual ‘learning and growth’ plans would be an open-ended questionnaire, where the designers and architects would be encouraged to describe in their own words their know-how, self-evaluate their contribution to the team, align their future learning plans with the needs of the organization, etc.

Questionnaire Value: Increase autonomy and initiative. Value: self-development, competence development

Refer to your contribution and responsibilities to the architecture firm/ design office.  Are you satisfied with your role? What would you change?

Do you feel that your talents, abilities are being respected and developed? What would you propose in order to increase opportunities for self-development or competence development?