Data Gathering Plan

It is recommended that you look at each week’s skills project and work ahead. Some assignments might take you more than two or three days to arrange and complete (e.g., interviews). In other words, your deliverable (memo) is due on day four of each week, but the planning and execution required to complete the deliverable might take you more than a couple of days to complete.

Week 2 Assignment:

Building on last week’s initial scouting work, this week you will design a data gathering process for verifying, contradicting, or otherwise clarifying some of your observations and conclusions in last week’s scouting memo (e.g., Does your organization develop people? Why/why not?). Data can be gathered through a variety of methods including interviews, observations, group discussions, and questionnaires.

Your “big question” for this week is what are the individual,  team, and leadership development needs? In other words, how could your organization improve its practices regarding individual, team, and leader development? What needs to change? 

Planning and Execution:

In this week’s work, you will build and implement a basic data gathering plan for the organization. In your plan, address the following themes

• Who do you need to ask (to determine the individual, team, and leadership development needs)? 
• What do you need to ask (what specific things do you need to ask to determine what needs to improve)? 
• How will you ask (what methods will you use to ask)?
• Your data gathering plan should include at least five questions (what you will ask) and at least two different methods (how you will ask them). 

After you have built your data gathering plan, implement at least some phase of it. You will likely not be able to implement your full plan (due to time restrictions). However, implement enough of your plan that you can gather some actual data to analyze. You may also include hypothetical data as needed to fill in some gaps. 

Deliverable:

Prepare a one to two page (500 to 1000 words, singlespaced) diagnosis memo that accomplishes the following things: 

• Reminds your readers about the organization you are working with (i.e., what is the organization?).
• Summarizes what you needed to ask and who you needed to ask in your data gathering.
• Provides at least five questions you asked
• Indicates at least two different methods you used to gather data. 
• Summarizes actual (and hypothetical as needed) data you gathered when you asked the questions using the methods you proposed.
• Determined at least three developmental needs for the organization emerging from the data.