The following questions help you focus on some important areas significant to performing a successful Network Analysis:

• Is the team willing to do a Network Analysis? Do you have team members’ or management’s consent?
• What is your boundary? Decide which set of people do you want to examine. This is not always easy since there are many loose connections and people may come and go.
• How to design the survey? To collect the relationship information, you need to distribute a survey and setup several criteria. You need to know what relationships you want to uncover and what scales to use to decide over these relationships. Here are some example questions:
  • When was the last time you talked to X?
  • How regularly do you talk about social life to X?
  • How regularly do you talk about work to X?
  • On how many projects have you worked with X?
• How should the relationships get defined? Use the answers to these types of questions based on a weight system to define the strength of a relationship and use this information to draw a graph.
• Should the data be collected as confidential? If you are recording this data and want to process it with your software, the team members are entitled to know what happens to the data you have collected from them. You may also need to refer to local employment laws and HR guidelines.
• How do you plan to distribute the results? It might be better to display the network with random labels rather than names, so that the focus will be on team improvement and not who does what. You may choose to reveal a random number to the corresponding team member so at least they know where they fit in the network.
• How will you use the results of the analysis? You need to have a performance evaluation before and after the analysis to compare any performance increase as a result of your analysis and subsequent organisational change within the team.