Free SWOT-Analysis on a Free Topic

History

Give a one page description about the history of the company or product. The Company I selected was Surveygizmo. They provided digital services to fortune 1000 companies; it was founded in 2006 by Christian Vanek. From late 1999 to early 2000, big corporate shifted their way of doing survey from black and white to digital, as per founder Vanek, there were so many companies who were providing the feedback to clients for surveys but most of them were not real time.

Vanek saw the opportunity and initially started a real time data matrix survey. The difference between Gizmo results and other survey was how the data will change upon completion of the first question and what insight a company can have by looking at the filtered, executed info. Surveygizmo data matrix results helped companies in decision making, product adoption, and executing price point.

Today, Surveygizmo is providing their services in four different segments, these segments are made up of Design, Collect, Analyze and Integrate, and the users who access these results and analysis are subject matter experts, project managers, and project sponsors, internal and external stakeholders. With the help of Cloud computing it is even more effect for Surveygizmo to process the data and integrate the result though SalesForce channel, so it can be readily available for everyone, this in fact save time and cautions the companies for greater risk as well as prepares them to work more proficiently. 

Define Quality

Provide a flow chart or description on how quality is valued and implemented within the organization or for the product. Provide reference to appendix of chart.

Quality can be defined in many ways, if the user’s requirements get met from any product or services, then that product of service can be called a quality product or service, hence quality is nothing but specific set of tasks or requirements which meet user’s need.

Quality is valued and impalement within the organization or for the product through specific chain of commands, these chain of commands are consist of Quality Management, this gets managed or executed by Quality management system. Though quality management system we exercise quality control or QC to make sure stake holder’s requirement are being met and give them assurance through quality assurance or QA, that we are responsible to maintain what was promised and what is being delivered for.

Implementation depends on 8 different channels,

1. first is to make sure what is the goal of the company,
2. Second channel is who is going to take a lead or leading the team towards the expected goal.
3. Third channel is what stake holders are going to work on?
4. Fourth is what process approach should be taken?
5. Fifth is what system should be use to manage the process management?
6. Sixth is how we can have continuo improvement?
7. Seventh is to make sure that whatever the decision is being made or taken, it all depends on facts and figure nothing is estimated or predicted and
8. the eight is how beneficial the existing relationship is within the clients either buyers or suppliers.

Once the quality is valued then management has to make sure that followed process is exercised the PCDA module, it helps the management to improvise and maintain the quality process. 

Describe any quality problems the company may currently have. You may also want to describe quality problems they have had in the past and how they solved those issues. Surveygizmo currently facing issues of limited integrated tool, they can only integrate the data through SalesForce but if their client is using Microsoft Dynamic or Oracle or SAP, then we have to do third party integrated, and this actually take more time and process flow either gets interrupted or information gets lost. In order to solve this problem, they came up with the idea to have Single Sign on Page, so their clients can log on to their cloud servers and access the required results. Upon using the single sign on page, clients had to upload, processed and extract the data. This method improved the process performance at Surveygizmo end but client’s task got doubled. To elevate this Surveygizmo decided to come up with Surveygizmo application program interface (API). Because of API, logic & branching, reporting, pre-built project survey scripting can be integrated with any ERPs as well as CRM systems. 

Describe management’s role/involvement in the quality of the company or product. Making changes in a company is not easy. The goal is to make a positive impact, quality tools should be assessed based on their effects on the business.

Some questions should be considered like:

• Is the approach utilized in the real world? 
• Is the approach a correct fit for or adaptable to the business?
• Does the approach deliver measurable results? 
• Does the approach address the root cause of problem? 
• Does the approach challenge the status quo?
• Proven tools come from responding to economic, social and competitive challenges, ultimately, lasting changes to the firm will come from management profoundly understanding the business.

At Gizmo, I see the Deming’s 14 points where used and executed 

1. Create constancy of purpose: Gizmo management was determined that they will solve all the hurdles, this is why even after 12 years now companies have some big name brand clients.
2. Adopt a new philosophy: When Vanek saw the old method is not working any more in companies favor, so he took 360 degree turn, and started building API 
3. Cease mass inspection: Quality at source was practiced, management trusted and trained the newly hire work force, which not only built the API but also mentioned it for different platforms. 
4. End awarding business on basis of price tag: Vanek decided instead of outsourcing the work, he hired the team of developers in-house and have them work for Gizmo; this eventually helped them to expand their services to next level. 
5. Constantly improving the system: By having the team in-house Vanek were successfully kept on improving Gizmo and managed to open up three new Gizmo offices in three different states. 
6. Institute training on the job: Vanek trained more people and had his current team to take more training course as per business related so they would become more professional in their line of work. 
7. Improve leadership: Vanek hired Chief Operating Office Nichole Johnson. 
8. Drive out Fear: Nicole drove out fear from Gizmo Developers and gave them free hand to improve and keep practicing until they get succeeded 
9. Break down barriers between departments: Nicole centralized all the departments in one unit, this helped employees to get connect to one another on daily basis. 
10. Eliminate Slogans: Vanek made sure that no one gets entitlement; instead he came up with the idea to break the teams in different category and have them work together under the same program but different projects. 
11. Eliminate work standards: When Nicole centralized all the departments together, all the employees felt relieved because she also eliminated work standards. 
12. Remove barriers to pride: At Gizmo, everyone was like colleague to each other, there was no one boss or subordinate, and everyone was treated equally with respect and honor.
13. Institute education and self-improvement: At Gizmo, Vanek used to send the software engineers for training to learn something new; this actually helped them out in improving themselves.
14. Put Everybody to Work: Vanek set the example by working on the floor with employees that everyone at Gizmo is being treated equally. 

Describe how the company views and analyzes the customer needs. (Use the text for guidance when looking for questions you should be addressing). At Surveygizmo, all of their customers are corporation, to some extents there are some similarities between individual customers and corporations but the stakes are very high with corporate customers. Surveygizmo uses the CRM tool called SalesForce, to make sure that complaint resolutions have been taken in accounts and corrective actions been performed through internal and external provided feedback, as a result a Guarantee can be provided to clients that survey result will be 100%. Corrective actions are mostly based on gap analysis. Gap analysis identifies the difference between managerial and customer perceptions of what the customer wants.

As per text there are 5 stages of GAP analysis through which a company can analyzes the customer needs and can provide what customer is actually looking for.

• First stage is, expected service versus management perception of consumer expectations,
• second stage is management perceptions of consumer expectations versus service quality specs,
• third stage is service quality specs versus service deliver,
• fourth stage is service delivery versus external communication to customers, and fifth and
• final stage is expected service versus perceived service. 

Does the company use any leadership practices? If so explain. If they do not use any leadership practices what practices should be used. Leadership is a key strategic variable for quality management. A leader organizes, plans, controls, communicates, teaches, advises and delegates. Leadership is also the process by which a leader influences a group to move towards the attainment of super ordinate goals. Leadership must share its power with followers, as a result, leadership is about the sharing of power, and these powers take many forms for instance; 

1. Power of expertise
2.  Reward power
3. Coercive power 
4. Referent power 
5. Legitimate power

I think all leadership types discussed above are exercised at Surveygizmo, since they have board of directors who share the power of expertise, CEO, CFO, COO who have legitimate power and so on.

Define/discuss the organizational structure. Provide chart in appendix. Organizational structure varies from organization to organization, most common organization structure we usually found are functional, divisional, flatarchy and matrix. These structures further then divide as Projectile, Strong Matrix, and Balanced Matrix & Weak Matrix. These also depict whose has how much power. At Surveygizmo they have functional structure as it shows in the chart below; 

• Do teams exist in the company?
• If so what type?

Explain. If not, what type of team(s) would best fit within the company? We see there are teams / departments exist at Survey Gizmo, we see the biggest team is of Customer Support is consist of 28 technical rep, followed by Sales team consist of 19 sales rep then followed by development team which is made up of 15 developers and then followed by Operations team, which is made of 10 professionals. All these teams have their own specific role and duties but they are responsible to respond back to COO Nicole and CEO David.

Does compensation and recognitions exist within the company? If so what type? Explain if you would suggest another method to motivate employees. Goals get provided to sales team at the beginning of every month, the more business they bring in, the more they can make on top of their base salary. Sales people earn more than developers there, and this is because these are bringing the business, but if we look at broader picture, the developers don’t really get much except hefty paycheck but I think either they should get a part of commission or they should get a pie of the company like should be offered to have common share, since I think without developers Surveygizmo cannot sustain or attain their goals. 

Quality Ethics

Describe any ethical or unethical aspects of the company’s quality standards (most companies will not have negative ethical issues to report. So, discuss about the positive aspect). Surveygizmo is very Ethical Corporation, they provide paid holidays up to 14 weeks, and we as well as 4 weeks paid holiday for newly fathers. In terms of hiring talents, they are also very diverse and adapt a way provide ongoing training to employees so they can keep up with new technology so do the Surveygizmo, since without its employees, Surveygizmo cannot survive. 

SWOT Analysis

Describe the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, the company or product has with the current quality standards (DO NOT provides me with the overall company SWOT analysis). They way company is running now is doing very good since the integration of API with third party applications and ERP systems, I see their strength of providing 40 difference services might be their weakness too.

What I think they should just focus on what are good at instead of having in house developers the best solution will be to provide services but rather have it done offshore or through third party. Amazon Web Services, Windows Dynamics can be call their leading competitors since Survey Gizmo are now providing the same services which these tech giants are. There are chances that Amazon might acquire Surveygizmo, to become a biggest player in this field too. 

Areas for Improvement

Based on the information you have gathered, what improvements do you recommend for the organization in managing the quality of their product? BE SPECIFIC!!!

What measurements, tools, or methods, would you use to insure if the changes improved quality (use what you have learned from the text to answer this question)? This should be at least a page long!

The improvements which I will recommend to Surveygizmo is to have focus group when it comes to provide new services, they have to gather the feedback to make sure what clients are really looking for. Sometimes customers tend not to go back to the places where the services level is low. I think Surveygizmo should take a closer look at quality of service they provide, and should crunch the numbers and find what the pitfalls of reactive customer-driven quality are. They should actively solicited customer-feedback approaches.

I think they should more focus on Mobile surveys, impressions on surreys, advance reporting, data cleaning and export formats also making it sure and realizable for consumers and for clients. I think there sales departs should focus more on generating leads since now a day’s everywhere we shop, on receipt we see that company wants us to give them a feedback from Home Depots to Dunkin Donuts, everyone want to know how the customer services experience was? My recommendation for Surveygizmo will to be launch a service by which customers either can get points or get some kind of perks for completing the survey and these perks can be provided by companies for whom the survey is being done.

Another chunk of business I think Surveygizmo is missing is from the Government Agencies, I think they should approach federal and local government, since their all decision are based on data analytic, I think Surveygizmo can help them by providing their services, and this will be in return beneficial for Surveygizmo.

Cite this page