Cost/Numeric Component for Ideas

vivek.bhaskaran

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I had a great conversation with a client (actually potential) about extending IdeaScale to provide for a costing model for ideas. As is typical with most businesses - feedback and enhancements are not FREE - everything has a cost associated with it. Currently with IdeaScale we are not focusing on capturing either the cost (or value) of any particular idea.

On internal sites, this can be referenced as "Cost Savings" or "Revenue Generation" - Users (both who are posting ideas) as well as voting on them should be able to quantify the cost savings a particular idea will produce.

In some cases, only the idea author may be able to define the cost/value, and in other cases both idea authors as well as voters can define the cost/value for an idea.

One solution to this issue, is to come up with a Numeric (Enter $ Value) Custom Field on IdeaScale and use this as a model for reporting median values etc.

Idea # 270Development, numeric component cost value

Comments

Stew 9 months ago

This is a good idea. In general, being able to calculate on and edit Custom Field values would be very powerful.

Stew 9 months ago

Actually, I thought of another use case for this type of thing. If the Custom Field was only visible to moderators on a customer facing portal it could be used for some type of internal weighting. For example, using a Custom field used to hold an estimated "Days to develop feature". If we could control the calculation formula then we could do something like...

Internal Rating = Customer Votes / Days to Implement

This would provide a way to provide "Bang for the Buck" analysis in addition to the regular popular vote. This might help moderators know when something should be graduated or promoted to an internal tracking system.

Mr. C 9 months ago

The ability to change custom field values, make calculations and decisions based upon them, and limit the scope of who can view or edit them would be key to the usefulness of metrics like this.

I'm in favor of the concept if it includes the implied workflow and decision-making capabilities that would make use of the data value.

Stew 9 months ago

Something came up at a presentation of IdeaScale this morning that relates to this. The question was basically, "Will our bigger customers be turned off from using this if they only have one vote?"

To compensate internally for this it would be nice if we could could assign a multiplier factor to specific logins. In other words, perhaps externally all the customers would still see regular vote count. But internally we would see the actual vote count and a "weighted" vote count.

By default a login would have a value of "1". But we could change our larger customers to have "2" or "3" depending on their size, etc. Then when the internal weighted vote count was calculated it would multiply the votes and then add them.

Example:
User 1 (1 vote X weight of 1) = 1
User 2 (1 vote X weight of 3) = 3
User 3 (1 vote X weight of 2) = 2

This would give an interesting scoreboard type of view that could be expanded to show other things as well.

Actual Votes: 3 Weighted Votes: 6 Cost: 5

Then, to take it a step further the internal scoreboard numbers could be given a custom calculation to provide an overall evaluation number.

Weighted Votes / Cost = Idea Rank.

To be able to see an order of all ideas as a moderator in Idea Rank order would be quite powerful. We could even explain to our customers that when we were evaluating their votes internally the votes would be weighted based on their size or something that would make sense to them (license seats, etc.). Just a thought. This obviously doesn't apply to all portals but for the ones that it does apply to it would be quite powerful.

This is the type of analysis that really helps justify changing internal processes because it provides something that is not currently measured very well.

vivek.bhaskaran 9 months ago

@ Mr. S

We are getting into some serious "Process Modeling" here with these models. While these models make sense, it also increases the complexity of IdeaScale - while this is not a bad idea, it also means a lot of users who need a simple easy-to-use/understand tool get turned off.

I am not saying this is necessarily a bad idea - simply that complexity can overwhelm us and kill us in the longer run - Given what we charge for IdeaScale - the additional complexity from a business standpoint may not make too much sense.

-v

Stew 9 months ago

I agree that this is certainly more complex. A couple points:

1. The complexity would have to be optional or hidden from those that didn't care about it.
2. Some might be willing to pay more for this type of capability per month
3. The addition of this feature may not be worth it for you for the vast majority of your customers

So I understand it may not be economically viable for you right now, but it is neat to think about what it could evolve into someday. ;-)

Mr. C 9 months ago

I'd say, given your point about available resources, perhaps making your general-purpose features rock solid would be bigger bang-for-the-buck than such a specialized concept (without the workflow it implies).

I think the initial "Costing Model" idea above, in its simplest form, is just a good implementation of Custom Fields that can be edited over time.

The Moderator would be required to manually ensure that the value of their Implementation Cost or Benefit custom fields actually had meaning or integrity.

For IdeaScale to help in workflow, an option to restrict editing of particular Custom Fields (Moderators only at a minimum) could be enough to give a process some integrity that end-users cannot mess up with indiscriminate updates. An audit trail of the changes to the Custom Fields would also be very important.

wendy.marques 8 months ago

It would be very nice to have a weighted rank. As it stands we are going to have to develop separate portals for different tiered/weighted customers.

abates 7 months ago

I'll just add my vote for allowing some kind of user "weighting" as some people are definitely "more equal than others" in commenting and voting on specific issues.

We're looking at using ideascale to evaluate possible enhancements to our product. We don't want to maintain separate portals for our resellers and end-users. Reseller votes generally would could for more in favour of a particular idea, and larger reselers would carry more weight than smaller ones.

This topic of idea and participant weighting was discussed at some length on the original ideascale forum, and all this trhead was lost in the move. (sigh)

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