Active Management: A New Strategy for Managing Data Collection Luc Tremblay
Luc Tremblay ; Statistics Canada, Canada
Managing collection activities has, for a long time, been limited to verifying the response rate of a survey through
out the course of collection. However, a new concept has recently emerged called Active Management which takes
managing collection to a whole new level.
Active management goes way beyond controlling the response rate. Rather, it looks at controlling the whole
production process dynamically as it unfolds. It starts at the conception of the survey by specifying, the different
reports which will be made available to the operations staff to view the progress, but goes beyond reports to full control over various operational parameters which can be changed in the field quickly in reaction to collection
issues.
For example, the clients ensure that all stratum are identifiable on the sample, and stratum reports are given to
collection staff who use different groups to help them ensure that the different strata evolve proportionally. Time
slice definitions are now used to control different types of respondents to ensure maximum pay off of every call.
Managers look at production data to identify best practices such as best time to call, maximum number of tries,
refusal conversion rates per try after initial refusal, the most efficient number of busy dials to use and their best
repartition, etc…
This presentation will review where we are in terms of Active Management, and how we used different tools from
Blaise software to support this concept at Statistics Canada.
| Contact: luc.tremblay@statcan.ca |