As a dean or program manager, there are often many things that you would like to improve in your graduate management or executive education program, but you do not have the resources to tackle all of them.
One of your biggest managerial challenges is to allocate your limited resources to where they will have to biggest impact. So how do you know where they will do the most good? Where can you "get the most bang for your buck?" One way to determine the best course of action is to conduct a Key Driver Analysis of your GME student surveys or executive education surveys.
What is Key Driver Analysis?
Key Driver Analysis can help you understand what your learners feel is important to them regarding their business school experience. By conducting an analysis of learner survey responses and correlating their ratings of individual performance attributes to overall loyalty, you can derive which factors have the greatest impact on the learners’ level of satisfaction. You can plot these data in a scatter diagram called an importance-performance map.
Importance-Performance Maps
An importance-performance map plots the results of a KDA in a graphical format that can be quickly read and easily understood. Each program performance factor is plotted on the graph by its importance to the learners’ loyalty (on the x-axis) and your program’s performance in that area on the y-axis.
This process generates four quadrants. The most important is the lower right quadrant. The attributes plotted here have high importance to your learners, but your performance in those areas is low. These are the areas where your action will have the biggest impact and generate the greatest improvement in learner satisfaction for the effort expended.
Action Planning from Key Driver Analysis
The lower right quadrant (II) is the most important area of the importance-performance map. It identifies the key drivers of learner satisfaction. The graphical KDA map helps you plan the action you need to take to improve, but it also tells you what to not change. The attributes that are plotted in the upper right quadrant (I) are those that are important to your learners’ satisfaction and are areas in which you are currently performing well. Any changes you make to improve the issues in the lower right quadrant must not disturb the attributes in the upper right quadrant.
The attributes in the upper and lower left quadrants are of lower importance to your learners. How well you perform in these areas will have less impact on learner satisfaction. You should not expend your limited resources on these factors.
How Do I Conduct Key Driver Analysis?
Key Driver Analysis is a value-added statistical analysis package integrated into the Program Roadmap & Market Trends Reports for all of the Percept Research GME Lifecycle surveys. The KDA provides a graphical quadrant analysis of the GME program based on program performance compared to the derived importance of learner loyalty. (Note: The KDA for the GME Student Entry Survey is based on stated importance.)
An importance-performance map is generated for each dimension within the survey (e.g., Faculty, Curriculum, Teaching Methods, Course Areas, Professional Development, Operations/Administration, etc.).
KDA is a powerful tool for business school quantitative research that can help you discover which factors have the greatest impact on important program outcomes and determine where to focus your limited resources on the issues that are both important and performing relatively poorly.
UPDATE: Percept Research is now integrating Key Driver Analysis in the Program Roadmap & Market Trends Reports for all MBA Lifecycle surveys. Click here for more information.
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Brian Mahoney, author of this article, is a marketing research consultant and Managing Partner of Percept Research. Brian welcomes your questions and comments.