Tips to create a needs assessment to boost team efficiency

Summary

A needs assessment is a process for determining the needs, otherwise known as "gaps," between current and desired outcomes. When used properly, this assessment provides valuable insight into your team’s processes and highlights areas for efficiency improvements.

When you’re balancing multiple growth initiatives and new projects, it’s hard to know which team improvements to prioritize. Where do you even begin?

When in doubt, try a needs assessment. A needs assessment helps you determine the most important process gaps so you can achieve your desired outcome in the shortest amount of time. Not only will assessing your current processes give you insight into how your team works, but it can also help identify areas of potential efficiency improvements.

Reducing work about work and streamlining processes doesn’t just increase productivity—it also boosts team morale . By listening to your team members and improving any painful processes, you can help them achieve their highest-impact work faster. Read on to learn how to create a needs assessment of your own.

What is a needs assessment?

A needs assessment is a process for determining the needs, or "gaps," between a current and desired outcome.

A is an opportunity for improvement within a particular process or system. When you identify—and resolve—needs, you can act on potential new opportunities, like making processes more efficient, streamlining resource allocation , and identifying resource gaps in your current workflow .

For example, say your team is working on a process to organize customer data. A needs assessment would be a great way to understand where gaps exist in the data collection process—such as missing or inaccurate information—and where internal resources could be better utilized.

What is the purpose of a needs assessment?

The purpose of a needs assessment is to identify areas within a process that need improvement. Use a needs assessment on existing processes to analyze data and inform internal changes.

Examples of processes you might use a needs assessment to accomplish include:

A process to automate duplicative manual work.

A customer journey process that is underperforming.

It can be challenging to pinpoint exactly where enhancements are needed. When you’re faced with multiple areas of opportunity, a needs analysis can help you identify the best areas of improvement.

Needs assessment example questions

A needs assessment is a great way to improve processes, but it’s not always easy to get started.  During a needs assessment, you’ll ask questions to get to the bottom of why the need is happening. To get started, take a look at some example questions to get a better understanding of the data you’re looking for.

Success rate questions

Performance questions

Operational questions

Identifying needs requires team communication, problem solving skills, and out-of-the-box ideas. Use these questions as a jumping off point to get the ball rolling. Once you know which questions to ask, you can begin to gather data.

How to conduct a needs assessment

A needs assessment is a great way to analyze and interpret relevant data. To do this, you need to understand your team’s baseline needs, as well as the process’s overall desired outcome.

Enlist the help of key stakeholders, funders, and decision makers and collect feedback through meetings or brainstorming sessions. However you choose to start, here are the four steps to follow when conducting a needs assessment.

1. Identify your team’s needs

To determine the gaps between existing and ideal processes, you first need to understand what the ideal process looks like. Clear objectives are the best way to ensure you’re creating a measurable, actionable, and results-oriented needs assessment.

Before you can start collecting and analyzing information for your needs assessment, take some time to consider your desired outcomes. Set objectives and gather data on areas of opportunity to plan deadlines and understand the intended outcome.

Your team members are probably closer to the process than you are, and they have valuable insight into potential process improvements. Gather feedback from your project team, or host a general brainstorming session to identify your team’s biggest gaps.

Work with your team to answer the following questions:

What needs are you trying to solve?

How is this process currently implemented?

Where are the biggest opportunity gaps?

What are your desired outcomes?

Are you looking to solve a specific problem or a more general process?

Do you have clear, measurable data sources?

How will you measure success?

2. Collect internal information

Next, gather information on how to best solve the identified gaps. Remember that the goal of a needs assessment is to understand how to get from your current process to the desired outcome.

Gather data from various departments and stakeholders who are closest to the process. At this point, you’ve already brainstormed with your close project team members, but it’s also critical to understand what your cross-functional partners need from this process improvement as well. In order to create a good needs assessment, you need detailed information, so encourage stakeholders to share in depth data about their specific needs. The more information you have, the more likely your needs assessment is to succeed.

Some questions to consider when gathering information include:

Where are improvements needed?

Why are current methods underperforming?

Do we have enough resources to execute a more successful process?

These questions will help you gather the necessary details to move on to step three.

3. Gather external information

You’ve gathered information from your project team and from cross-functional stakeholders, all that’s left is to gather information from external sources. Getting information from external sources, in addition to your internal collaborators, gives you a bird’s eye view of the process from start to finish.

There are multiple ways to gather external information on your target group, including:

Customer questionnaires : Used to gather quick, high level customer data from multiple geographical locations.

Focus groups : Used to gather in depth information from a specific geographical location.

It’s also a good idea to enlist a fresh pair of eyes to follow the process from start to finish to catch additional inefficiencies. While the type of needs assessment technique you use will depend on your situation, you should opt for the one that gives you the best chance of correcting inefficiencies.

4. Use your data

At this point, you’ve collected all of the information you can. The only thing left to do is to use your needs assessment results and insights to inform your process improvements.

Use the information you gathered in steps one through three to transform your needs assessment data into a cumulative report. In addition to the notes, details, and observations you’ve made during your brainstorming sessions, add a summary documenting the next steps. In particular, what phases, technical assistance, training programs, and other components that will help you implement the process changes.

Implementing the results of your needs assessment will take time. Make sure your team has an effective process in place to guide the improvement, like:

Project management tools : Help to organize information and communicate with team members.

Change management : Assists with documenting need and gap changes.

Business process management (BPA) : Helps to analyze and improve processes.

Process implementation planning : Outlines the steps needed to reach a shared goal.

The 3 types of need assessment techniques

There are many different data collection methods—from quantitative techniques like surveys to qualitative techniques such as focus groups.

Needs assessments provide crucial data on existing processes and help teams create more effective systems. Here are three of the most popular methods of collecting needs assessment data.

Questionnaires: Questionnaires and interviews are the most popular methods for collecting needs data. A questionnaire is a surface level form with general, yes or no questions. This is a great way to find quick information, like when you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your brand identity.

Surveys: Many teams use surveys to collect external information around customer experience. Surveys often include open-ended questions, so they provide more in-depth information than questionnaires. This is a great way to find accurate but quick information, like when you’re evaluating the success of your post-purchase experience from the customer’s perspective.

Focus groups: A focus group is an interview involving a small number of participants who share common traits or experiences. While they require considerably more time than the other two methods, focus groups provide extensive information around needs and customer experience. This is a great way to find in depth information, like when you’re evaluating how your customers experience your brand and what they think could be improved.

While the technique you use will differ depending on the type of process data you’re collecting, each of these methods can help you gather valuable insight on both internal and external needs.

Identify your team’s needs with an analysis

Performing a needs assessment is a great way to understand how current processes are being handled and how you can streamline tasks and communication. Knowing which needs are most important isn’t always obvious. With a needs analysis, you can gather the data you need to make your team more efficient.

If you’re looking to improve efficiency and productivity as a team, make information easy and tasks streamlined with productivity software. From empowering collaboration to creating and sharing templates, UDN Task Manager can help.