Feedback is essential for any CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) project to succeed. It helps you understand the needs, expectations, and challenges of your users and stakeholders, and improve your system accordingly. But how do you solicit and implement feedback from your CMMS users and stakeholders effectively? Here are some tips to help you.
Before you ask for feedback, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your CMMS project. What are the main objectives, benefits, and metrics of your system? How do you align them with your organizational goals and strategies? How do you communicate them to your users and stakeholders? Having a well-defined vision and scope will help you focus your feedback questions and actions.
Your CMMS users and stakeholders are the people who interact with, influence, or are affected by your system. They may include maintenance technicians, managers, operators, vendors, customers, regulators, and others. You need to identify who they are, what their roles and responsibilities are, and how they use or benefit from your CMMS. This will help you segment your feedback audience and tailor your approach accordingly.
There are many ways to collect feedback from your CMMS users and stakeholders, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, workshops, observations, usability tests, and analytics. You need to choose the methods that suit your goals, audience, and resources. For example, surveys can help you gather quantitative data from a large group of users, while interviews can help you explore qualitative insights from key stakeholders. You also need to consider the frequency, timing, and format of your feedback methods.
Once you have collected feedback, you need to analyze it and identify the main themes, patterns, and issues. You can use tools such as spreadsheets, charts, or software to organize and visualize your feedback data. You also need to prioritize your feedback and decide which ones to act on first. You can use criteria such as urgency, impact, feasibility, and alignment with your goals to rank your feedback.
After you have prioritized your feedback, you need to plan and execute the changes or improvements that you want to make to your CMMS. You may need to involve your users and stakeholders in the implementation process, such as testing, training, or support. You also need to communicate your feedback actions and outcomes to your users and stakeholders, and explain how their feedback has contributed to your CMMS project. This will help you build trust, engagement, and satisfaction.
Finally, you need to monitor and evaluate the effects of your feedback actions on your CMMS performance and user experience. You can use metrics such as uptime, reliability, efficiency, productivity, quality, safety, and satisfaction to measure your results. You also need to solicit feedback again to see if your changes have addressed the issues or needs of your users and stakeholders, and if there are any new or emerging feedback. This will help you create a continuous feedback loop for your CMMS project.
Another avenue where CMMS is beneficial is the increase in operator efficiency. The ability to see what work needs to be done and when gives the opportunity to schedule jobs to be more proactive and productive with the hours in a work day.