Victims of Our Success: How OIR Survived the Flood of Ad-Hoc Requests for Faculty/Staff Satisfaction Survey Data

Abstract

In 2009, the University of Minnesota Office of Institutional research, in partnership with a steering team of select faculty and the Of- fice of Communications launched a massive effort to redesign its biennial HR survey, whose results in past years had been largely ignored by Uni- versity policy makers. In addition to a substantial paring down of the sur- vey instrument, the standard University-, Campus- and College-level re- ports were redesigned to provide more and immediate and actionable in- formation. This sparked a greater demand for more detailed drill- downs. To encourage greater use of this wealth of data, OIR developed an Excel-based ad-hoc report generator to quickly provide results for the seemingly infinite variations on the most commonly asked-for types of reports. To date, since its development less than a year ago, OIR has re- leased over 250 reports to administrators at all levels.

This presentation is a demonstration of how a combination of project plan- ning and some clever Excel tools allowed us to quickly and easily prepare customized reports for campus clients. Items that will be discussed in- clude our template/design model, our possibility matrix for determining whether or not a request for drill-down data meets minimum privacy standards, and Excel tools such as pivot tables, lookup tables, and macros that saved OIR from being buried by the fruits of its success.