Hi,
We are looking to make changes to our first project that is a daily support survey/dashboard. I would like to understand best practices that other companies are using for making changes ie creating a new project each time and mapping new source for distribution and dashboard versus shutting down survey while changes are being made and then starting survey up when testing is done. Please advise.
Best Practice for making project updates on daily transaction surveys/dashboards
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Userlevel 4
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Hi @Maureen_BRCM14!
Here are a few things that our team considers when making changes to surveys:
- Scope of the change: The decision to update an existing survey vs. create a new one is often determined by the scope of the change. If it is a small change or is "cosmetic" only (e.g., changing the Look and Feel) then it is probably OK to make the change and then use the 'Preview' feature to test the change before publishing. For larger changes, where the resulting data collected may change due to factors such as new questions being asked, new answer choices being available, etc., then it probably makes sense to create an entirely new version of the survey.
- Removing questions can cause data loss: If you have an active survey with responses and delete a question entirely, all response data associated with that question will also be deleted. Instead, the question should be hidden using display logic. Over time, this can make the survey build unwieldy and difficult to maintain.
- Traceability of changes over time: creating a new survey project to incorporate changes ensures that you have a clear historical record of what changed and when. This is helpful for analyzing changes in the data or troubleshooting. If your Qualtrics platform has access to dashboards, the data from multiple surveys can be merged for reporting purposes, so it doesn't hurt to have multiple versions of the survey that are fairly similar.
Regarding dashboards, we typically make changes to existing dashboards (not make a new copy) keeping in mind that we should make changes outside of peak viewing time so that users aren't impacted while the dashboard refreshes. If the scope of the changes are large, we may decide to make a copy of the dashboard to do development and get sign-off from a small group of users before applying the changes to the original dashboard.
Hope that helps!
Here are a few things that our team considers when making changes to surveys:
- Scope of the change: The decision to update an existing survey vs. create a new one is often determined by the scope of the change. If it is a small change or is "cosmetic" only (e.g., changing the Look and Feel) then it is probably OK to make the change and then use the 'Preview' feature to test the change before publishing. For larger changes, where the resulting data collected may change due to factors such as new questions being asked, new answer choices being available, etc., then it probably makes sense to create an entirely new version of the survey.
- Removing questions can cause data loss: If you have an active survey with responses and delete a question entirely, all response data associated with that question will also be deleted. Instead, the question should be hidden using display logic. Over time, this can make the survey build unwieldy and difficult to maintain.
- Traceability of changes over time: creating a new survey project to incorporate changes ensures that you have a clear historical record of what changed and when. This is helpful for analyzing changes in the data or troubleshooting. If your Qualtrics platform has access to dashboards, the data from multiple surveys can be merged for reporting purposes, so it doesn't hurt to have multiple versions of the survey that are fairly similar.
Regarding dashboards, we typically make changes to existing dashboards (not make a new copy) keeping in mind that we should make changes outside of peak viewing time so that users aren't impacted while the dashboard refreshes. If the scope of the changes are large, we may decide to make a copy of the dashboard to do development and get sign-off from a small group of users before applying the changes to the original dashboard.
Hope that helps!
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Thanks your response was helpful. What about when you make changes to customer email alerts in multiple languages and/or alert logic?
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