May 23, 2016 by Dr. Jian Huang

When developing new strategic initiatives and guiding strategy deployment, decisions makers need a targeted and specific grasp of their customer and employee priorities. Advancements in online feedback collection and data analysis are yielding more and more sophisticated methods for gathering insights that lead to making more informed and better decisions. The Action Priorities Grid (APG) is one of the latest methods for doing just that.

If you haven’t seen an APG before, the above is an example grid from a large company’s effort to compete for and retain top management talent. Their board wanted to gain a better understanding of the work related issues that impact the performance of their management team. Survature, an online feedback and analysis platform, made it easy to set up a survey that gathered the data necessary to generate an APG which targeted the profiles of their managers, directors and senior management (VP level and above). Each of these targets become a column in Survature’s unique take on the APG. Each column shows the target’s top concerns ordered by priority, with frequencies of the occurrences listed alongside (0 means almost “Never”, 3 means “Sometimes”, 5 means “Always”). The grid is broken down by demographic (gender) as well.

This APG answers a key question that applies to employees of every company. What work related issues keep them at night: budget/financial decisions, hiring/retaining talent, information overload, lack of equipment, lack of financial resources, lack of people resources, office politics, partner relationships, sales goals, time management, training staff members, work overload, workplace culture? In essence, the APG spells out the hierarchy of priorities that provide guidance on how to best take care of each facet for the management team. Which management level worries the most about meeting sales goals? Where does work overload hit people the hardest? Where does hiring and retaining talent appear top of mind? In a very direct way, the APG shows these insights and more.

Making smart, informed decisions is crucial for business leaders tasked with improving their organization and their position in the market. Making good decisions requires an in-depth understanding of their customers, employees, and partners. It’s also critical to know what needs improving first. The good news is that today’s data rich business environments offer much more insight than ever before. The bad news is that interpreting all this data in a meaningful way is a monumental task, even for those well versed in data analysis. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and suffer paralysis by analysis. APG solves this dilemma.

Survature is the leading provider of the Action Priorities Grid. Survature users include Fortune 500 companies, the biggest sports venue and music festival on earth, and the biggest Architecture + Design firms in the U.S. Survature is a leader in a new class of online feedback platforms. Survature’s unique AnswerCloud question collects responses from survey participants while assessing their behavior—which responses are chosen first, changed, or even ignored. Survature uses that process data to determine what matters most to participants. Because of the significantly better user engagement, Survature garners way more information and deeper insight than other platforms. Due to that capability, Survature’s APGs are more comprehensive and more accurate than executives are used to seeing.

Using data to make and justify decisions is fast becoming a standard in today’s business climate. Bring your customer and employee strategies into focus faster and smarter with Survature’s APG. Best of all, it's easy to deploy and the feedback analysis happens automatically in real-time.

• Survey taking time: about 1 minute

• Survey incentives: none needed

• Survey completion rate: 70% or higher, usually around 85-95%

• AGP production speed: real-time (as responses are being collected)

• Effort level: DIY, be a data oracle on your own.

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Jian Huang is the Chief Executive Officer at Survature providing the vision for reinventing the way the world experiences surveys. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee (UT) researching data analysis, visualization, and human-computer interaction. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Interior, Intel, NASA, and UT-Battelle. Jian received his PhD from the Ohio State University.