Past research shows that spreadsheet models are prone to such a high frequency of errors and data security implications that the risk management of spreadsheet development and spreadsheet use is of great importance to both industry and academia. The underlying rationale for this paper is that spreadsheet training courses should specifically address risk management in the development process both from a generic and a domain-specific viewpoint. This research specifically focuses on one of these namely those generic issues of risk management that should be present in a training course that attempts to meet good-practice within industry. A pilot questionnaire was constructed showing a possible minimum set of risk management issues and sent to academics and industry practitioners for feedback. The findings from this pilot survey will be used to refine the questionnaire for sending to a larger body of possible respondents. It is expected these findings will form the basis of a risk management teaching approach to be trialled in a number of selected ongoing spreadsheet training courses.
The questionnaire reported upon herein was a pilot survey sent to ten persons of whom six responded. It was intended that the results from this would be used to create a fuller more comprehensive questionnaire for eventual sending to at least 100 possible respondents. To establish the skills that needed to be covered in generic spreadsheet risk management training the pilot questionnaire was constructed around a minimum set of 16 questions addressing five training methods to be used and eleven generic skills to be taught. The questionnaire was also constructed with facility for respondents to suggest further areas of concern that needed to be covered. For accuracy, the pilot survey had to simulate the eventual final questionnaire as closely as possible so its preamble, questions, and distribution method were carefully considered. For the theoretical research perspective and research paradigm see appendix C.
Pre-amble: to explain the rationale of the questionnaire to the respondent. respondents to add suggestions of their own. Such feedback considered essential as it was expected that not all pertinent issues had been addressed.
‘Some Information About You’ section: collecting data about the respondents themselves e.g. for respondents who were trainers:
Please identify what kind of a trainer you are : What specific areas of modelling do you teach? May I approach you again to discuss your answers?
And for respondents from industry:
What industry are you involved with? Do you think that spreadsheet training approaches should be improved?
- The questionnaire was ended with a completely open section for further comments.
The initial 16 questions of the survey, the rationale for their inclusion, their drawbacks and supporting references are to be found in the table in Appendix A. The actual questionnaire is to be found in Appendix B.
It was initially considered to present the questionnaire without an explanatory preamble as the reading of this would take up respondent time. However, a short preamble was eventually included to clearly set the scene for the potential respondent.
The two initial sections of the questionnaire were: ‘Generic Training Methods’ and ‘Generic Training Content’. Each of these was included with an explanation of what these terms actually meant so misunderstandings could be limited -see example 1 below.
Aim: every course should have at least one instance of the following practices to raise student’s awareness of error situations and to develop self-reflective practices. Example 1 : Explanation of section ‘Generic Training Methods’
Similarly each question about a content or method to be considered was accompanied by a full descriptor -see example 2 below.
Respondents were encouraged to give their own suggestions in the ‘Anything else?’ sections of the questionnaire and in the last section entitled ‘Please make any further comments below’ -see Appendix B for the Actual Questionnaire sent out.
- In A Spreadsheet Training Course Chadwick D., 2.3 Scoring The Questionnaire 2.3.1 Yes/No answers: were considered but discounted because a Yes/No answer, although easier to use for statistical purposes, is too coarse a discriminator of opinion. Similarly, the use of all open questions, although possibly fruitful in new data, were also decided against as respondents may have found them too time consuming with resultant poor return response and/or a poor image of the survey.
was therefore adopted for scoring the questionnaire. Each question reply was given a weighting of importance by use of a Likert scale 1 -5. Five grades were considered sufficient to obtain worthwhile discrimination -less would have been too coarse. A guide to answering was also shown e.g.
The end and middle points had concise explanations included : ‘Not Needed’ and ‘Must Have’ were diametric opposites and the mid-point was deliberately chosen as ‘Indifferent’ rather than left to open interpretation as say ‘Ok but would leave out if something better came along’ or ‘Ok but may be optional’.
3 Free text : a section was included at the end of the questionnaire were included to enable more open answers, suggestions and comments. Interpretation of open section responses was done carefully to avoid personal bias e.g. bias could be introduced by the author taking on board only those comments he liked and so giving a personal weighting to the importance of the comment.
The Likert scale made analysis fairly straightforward especially when results of the six respondents were placed into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis -see Appendix D.
Table 1 shows the final ranking of the sixteen issues in order of the totals of the Likert scale grading. This indicates the order of importance to the pilot survey’s six respondents. It is clear from the responses that the issues mentioned in the questionnaire have different importance to the respondents -the use of Integral Documentation appears to be the most significant issue to be a
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