Welcome to the Listening Post!

From a survey perspective, it's more than translation. The typical multiple-country questionnaire has to deal with choice lists that vary by region:

• Purchase location questions; for instance, "Display at Starbucks counter" might apply only to North America and "Traveling widget-monger" only to Taiwan
• Imagery statements
• Ad recall lists, which are often not centrally managed or tracked
• Brand lists
• Synonymous brands: "Acme" in the United States, "Apex" in Canada
• Lists that change as products come and go

Regions for a global company can be quite different from one another, from foreign offices, to subsidiaries, to partners and other third parties, with a variety of resources and approaches. Coordination can be a logistical struggle.

The three principal challenges for multi-country research include content management, work flow control and code generation.

• Content management of the questionnaire, its translations, brand lists, norms, reporting definitions, even colors: Tasks range from content creation, aggregation and editing to version control and user management.
• Work flow control for tracking tasks, assuring quality, auditing and monitoring key metrics: unfortunately, BPM (Business Process Management) suites are typically too expensive for research applications and lack industry templates.
• Code generation: Turn content into usable forms, from paper questionnaires to web surveys, from data feeds to reporting specifications.

The required solutions for managing multi-country projects depend on the level of complexity that must be addressed.

"My personal preference," said Jeff, "is to always do the minimum necessary to get by. These are toolkits that we have available internally: we always try to use the least complexity [for the task at hand]. Once you use a custom toolkit, you realize that there will be changes and that adds complexity."