Surveys are a great tool for including more stakeholders to contribute with data, without having to learn how to use Ardoq. This is especially powerful for gathering data from the Business side of your organization given that surveys look like any other form with explanatory text.

There are three major use cases for Surveys:

This article walks you through how to a create a survey from scratch. Here, you can also find a detailed explanation of the different features in each section of the Survey Builder.

To learn how to generate a survey, check out the "How to Automatically Create a Survey" KB article.

Table of Contents:

Click on "Surveys" from the home page and click on "New Survey" from the survey overview page. Alternatively, select the component and choose "Create from the selected component" from the Survey menu.

You will then see the Survey builder. Here you can give your survey a name, email address, and description.

Make sure you enable survey digest emails to receive updates about the survey submission.

Select the workspace and the component type you would like to build the survey for. A Survey can revolve around one component type and its associated relationship and field.

You can also choose if you want to allow respondents to delete components in the app and the components you created through surveys.

You can configure your survey by using "Advanced search option." Use this option to narrow down or filter the components by applying rules. You can see the filtered components under "Preview Selected Components".

In this example applications classified as Cloud will only be exposed in the survey. It is not currently possible to create an advanced search on a rule-based on references and the workaround is to create a calculated field based on reference and use it for filtering.

To get a better understanding of advanced search, please refer to this article.

Click on "Add question" to create questions for your survey based on field or reference. You can also add a text section here to display in the survey.

In the example below, a field question is created for the field "Criticality."

Set the field question as you see in the image above. This does not indicate that respondents need to answer the question, but if you would like to achieve that set the "is this field required" checked.

You can also create a survey question for references. In the example below, a reference is created for the Application owner. The component type here for Person from the People workspace, and the direction of the reference is selected as Incoming and of type Owns.

The reference question is also required, and the minimum number of references is set to be 1. The application will therefore need at least one reference in the status field.

You can create a text or reference field question for a reference question by clicking on ‘Add a section to reference question’. The image below shows how a field question would look like for the reference question for the application owner.

Note: It is recommended to provide a good description for better quality answers to survey questions.

Click on the Result Display option to enable or disable the landing page so that respondents will only see existing entries. To add field columns to display in the survey, choose from the drop-down as in the image below.

The final section of the survey is called Result Filtering. Here you can limit which components will be visible for the survey taker to document:

Checking the Enable Filtering checkbox will give you access to two different result filtering types. The default choice is Filtering by Hierarchy (Parent).

Hierarchy filtering can come in handy when working with multi-layer component structures. It does not in any way limit what components are available for the survey takers to document, but adds a hierarchy navigator to the left of the survey. This makes it easier to show just the components which are relevant to the survey taker.

In the following example, we have a survey used to document what technologies the employees in different countries are familiar with. For example, you work in England and want to document which technologies your colleagues in that country are familiar with. Rather than having to scroll through the worldwide list of employees, you can simply click England in the hierarchy navigator, and only components corresponding to employees in England will be shown:

The other filtering option is called Filtering by Referenced Components:

This option lets you select which group of components to show based on which components they reference or are referenced by. This can be useful when component groups are defined by references, rather than the hierarchy.

In the following example, the result filtering is defined by which technology is referenced. For the survey taker, this will be shown as a navigator to the left of the screen, where it is possible to select a technology. Selecting a technology will show all the components which already exist and can be documented by the survey, which are connected to that technology:

Finally, remember to save changes and set the survey to Live. Next, assign a permission to your survey to define who can submit responses and share it with your stakeholders. Learn more about survey permissions in the section below.

In Ardoq, you can use privileges to define feature access and permissions to define content access. For instance, permission to access a particular survey.

Privileges can be enabled on a user role or individually per user. Enabling a privilege doesn’t mean users get access to all existing content (e.g. surveys) automatically. To grant users access to a specific content (e.g. a survey), you need to assign them a permission.

To ensure your users can access the content you share with them, first enable the right privilege. Next, assign them a permission on that content.

Given that you are an admin user in the Ardoq app and your organization has the Surveys add-on, you can grant users access to the Survey Builder by enabling the “Create Surveys” privilege on their user role or individually per user.

The “Create Surveys” privilege allows users to create new surveys and edit the ones they have been granted a permission on.

To grant Surveys access to a specific user role:

Enable the “Create Surveys” privilege on a user role when you wish to grant users with a specific user role access to the Survey Builder where they can create and edit surveys they’ve been granted access to. It is the easiest way to manage who can create and edit surveys in your organization. Once the “Create Surveys” privilege is enabled on a user role, it is not possible to disable it on specific users who have that user role.

For example, if you enable the “Create Surveys” privilege on the Writer user role, all of your existing Writer users, and those you add in the future, will be able to create and edit surveys. Because the “Create Surveys” privilege is enabled on the Writer user role, you won’t be able to disable the “Create Surveys” privilege on single users who have the Writer user role assigned.

Enable the “Create Surveys” privilege individually per user when you wish to give specific users access to the Survey Builder in case their user role does not grant it.

To enable the “Create Surveys” privilege on single users:

Survey Permissions: How to Share a Survey with Stakeholders

Once you have enabled the relevant survey privileges on the right users or user roles, you can assign users a permission on a particular survey to grant them access and determine what actions they can do on that specific survey.

To grant users a permission on a given survey:

The available permissions for Surveys are:

You can grant users the Administrator, Writing or Read-only permissions depending on their role:

👉 Learn more about privileges and permissions in the “Assign Users Access to Assets and Functionality” KB article.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or need help with creating the perfect Surveys for your organization.