The primer research for this project was to carry out a few well targeted interviews with senior business people. Six interviews were carried out at Director or Senior Manager level with cooperating companies including Large Engineering Manufacturers, the Banking Sector, An Engineering Support Software Company and a small Engineering Manufacturer.
The intention was to carry out open interviews with a stated focus. The openness or unstructured interviews were intended to allow free comment and avoid forcing people to answerer questions that may be irrelevant to their particular experience. The focus was provided by an interview support card (PDF) that listed several generic questions and a list of issues that the interview should address.
Interview transcripts were analysed in order to provide an initial objective measure and gain an insight into which issues company's felt needed to be addressed. Transcripts were analysed to identify statements about issues. Where new issues had been addressed, these were added to the list of issues. The result was a table of statements about issues. This table is rather long; containing 274 statements and so will not be reproduced here.
This table of statements about issues was returned to the interviewees with a request that each should be marked as either I agree with this statement, I disagree with this statement or This statement is not relevant to me (by ticking a box). Since the sample size was so small (few interviews) it was felt that the only sensible result from this second part of the study was to record only statements that met with unanimous agreement. This analysis lead to a table containing 113 statements.
Indications are that the 8 issues that have attracted most comment are:
It should be pointed out that Leadership and Risk were not part of the stated issues of the interview and were introduced by interviewees. This means that their significance is actually higher than shown here.
There is yet more information to be extracted from the initial interview transcripts. However, we feel justified in working on the eight issues identified for now.
