Let’s move ideas forward.
You’ve collected plenty of ideas with your push for engagement. Now it’s time make them matter.
Ideas need a place to go and a real path to move all the way to implementation. So they can push the limits of what’s possible and help you grow.
Define Phases
You have collected valuable ideas in a goal-driven and structured way. A great way to get the most out of them is to lay down a number of phases they will move through.
Take what’s good about your current process for ideas and map that version in a simple and practical way to your idea management platform
If you don’t have a process yet, we suggest the simple idea funnel mapped below. It makes sure every idea gets a chance to be improved before it is evaluated. That keeps things positive and everyone gets feedback.
Every phase you add to your funnel is an opportunity to involve Evaluators and make smarter decisions together.
You might invite 5 evaluators to rate ideas in one of the phases or project leaders to an implementation phase. It’s all up to you and about who you can mobilize.
Sometimes evaluating ideas is as simple as skimming them and moving the best ones along on first look.
With larger outreach involving more than 50 ideas it is best practice to structure and streamline that evaluation process.
When defining the phases you can set up evaluation criteria to match your way of identifying the ideas that are most likely to succeed.
You are free to shape the evaluation criteria any way you like and you can even add weighting to make some of them more impactful but in the end it is good to keep it simple.
A best practice example is the ICE evaluation scale - asking your Evaluators to rate ideas on the Impact, Confidence and Ease of the submitted ideas.
You’ve shepherded ideas all the way through the Phases, evaluated them and found the best.
Sort by highest average rating. You’ve let people evaluate ideas. You can easily sort and filter in the interface.
Move the best ideas to a separate phase. Make it clear for you, the evaluators and stakeholders which ideas have been selected by moving them to a separate phase.
