Overview of Surveys

A survey is a set of questions that may be associated with assessments or distributed independently of assessments.

• You may link a survey to an assessment activity in an assessment plan. Survey questions concern the type of object (process, risk, or control) and the activity specified in the plan. Answers to the questions help assessors form judgments about objects in assessments developed from the plan.

• A stand-alone survey poses questions unrelated to assessments. You'd need not only to create the survey, but also to initiate it. As you initiate a survey you may, but don't have to, select a specific object or perspective to ask questions about. Initiation also involves selecting a set of people who respond to the questions.

In either case, base the survey on a template, which combines a set of questions with instructions for answering them.

As you prepare a survey, you work with the following components:

• Choice sets. A choice is a possible answer to a question, and a choice set is an assortment of answers a person may select from. You can associate a given choice set with any number of questions.

• Questions: These may not require choice sets. Or, you can select choices as you create questions, and save them into choice sets. Or you can select already-configured choice sets.

• Template: As you create a template, you can select existing questions for it, or create questions. Moreover, you can use an existing template to distribute a new survey, or create a new template for a survey.

• Participant lists: You can create lists of users who are to respond to survey questions, then select one or more lists as you initiate a stand-alone survey.

To work with surveys, select the Risk Management springboard. Among its options, select Surveys. Then select among six tabs: Worklists displays your survey worklist assignments. A Surveys tab opens a page to manage surveys. Four more tabs open pages to work with questions, choice sets, templates, and participant lists.