Triage and Progress
Review: Triage & Progress
Once your challenge begins to receive ideas, you will want to begin thinking about how to review and progress these
ideas. Depending on your challenge plan (e.g. “always on” or “campaign-driven”), you may do this on a periodic basis or
at a fixed point in the challenge lifecycle.
Either way, in this article, we describe methods for reviewing, triaging, and progressing the ideas submitted to your
challenge.
1. Review Ideas Using the Idea List
The idea list is a simple way to view and manage ideas in your challenge. We recommend using this for quickly finding or
filtering ideas for review whilst your challenge is open.
For more precise management and idea project progression, we recommend instead using the Project Board, as discussed in
section 2 below.
1.1. View Your Idea List
Find your challenge via the “Challenges” link in the top navbar, and then select “View challenge”.
From here, tap the “Ideas” tab in the challenge sidebar.
1.2. View an Idea on the List
The idea list shows the ideas in a tabular view. At a glance, this shows the idea’s name, its author (and team), its
status and updated/submitted date, and the number of tags, comments, and likes it has.
To open an idea (view an idea in-full), simply tap its name, and a popout will appear to display the idea.
You can then view and interact with the idea, and then tap the Close button to return to the list.
1.3. Use the Idea List
The idea list provides a number of options for viewing and managing your ideas.
Filter and search the list
By default, the idea list shows all ideas to your challenge – whether they’re submitted or not. If your challenge has a
lot of ideas, it can be useful to filter them in order to find the one(s) you’re currently interested in viewing.
The search bar allows you to quickly find an idea by its name or the name of its author(s). This is useful for finding a
specific idea.
The Show filters button provides more controls over how the list should be filtered and ordered. Tap this to bring up
the filter controls popout. Once you’ve set the controls you need, tap off the controls window to hide the popout.
Below we summarise some of the controls:
- Sort: determines the order in which ideas are displayed in the list. You can select a sort attribute and then a
direction (ascending or descending).
- Status: filters the list by all, draft, or submitted ideas. Filtering to draft ideas shows you which ideas may need
prompting, and filtering to submitted ideas shows you ones that may need action.
- Impact: filter ideas to see the ones that address one or more of your impact measures.
- Tags: filter ideas by specified tags.
- Author groups: filter ideas by author membership to a SimplyDo group. For example, to view the ideas belonging to a
department or other group you’ve set up.
- Project assignment: filter ideas on whether they’re assigned to yourself or another specific assignee.
- Project lane: show ideas that belong to specified project lanes.
- Admin comments: show ideas that have (or don’t have) comments written by challenge managers. If you aim to respond
to each submitted idea, then using this filter lets you quickly find ideas to which you need to respond.
- Content: filter ideas by responses in the idea itself. For example, if your idea format contains a dropdown field,
you can filter ideas by the response to that field.
Once you’ve made your sort and filter selection, you can dismiss the popout by tapping off it. The idea list behind will
update automatically in response to your choices.
1.4. Manage Ideas Using the List
The challenge’s idea list view can be used for light management on a per-idea basis or in-bulk.
Manage a specific idea
To manage a specific idea in your idea list (which you may find using the search and filtering functions described
above), use the cog icon button displayed at the right-hand side of the idea in the list.
Tapping this button shows a number of options for management, the primary ones of which are described below:
- Pin: pin this idea in your list. Pinned ideas show first by default to viewers of the list. You can also configure
your challenge settings to only show pinned ideas to non-challenge-managers. Pinning thus provides a mechanism for
“approving” ideas before they show on the list to other users.
- Set submission deadline: provide a custom deadline for this idea. This deadline will override the challenge
deadline, and aims to give specific ideas more time to be completed.
- Add authors to group: add all of this idea’s authors to a specific SimplyDo group
- Export as PDF: download a PDF representation of this idea.
- Apply a label: assign symbolic labels to this idea. Labels can be later used for filtering or for targeting
announcements.
- Delete idea: fully deletes the idea.
Some of these options are also available when the idea is open. Open an idea by tapping its name in the list, and the
action buttons provide a number of these options.
Manage multiple ideas
If you want to perform the same action on many ideas at once, you can select ideas and choose a bulk action.
To do so, use the checkboxes to select the ideas you want to manage, and then tap the X ideas button that appears above
the list.
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This displays a number of options for management, as described in more detail in the section above.
2. Manage Ideas Using the Project Board
The project board is an excellent resource for helping you to manage, triage, and progress ideas once they’ve been
submitted. A good process ensures that ideas are treated fairly, planned out well, and that updates are well
communicated to relevant stakeholders.
This section assumes you’ve built up your project board lane structure as described in our previous article.
2.1. View Your Project Board
Find your challenge via the “Challenges” link in the top navbar, and then select “View challenge”.
From here, tap the “Project Board” tab in the challenge sidebar.
2.2. Understand Your Board
Your project board is formed from lanes, each containing zero or more ideas.
We go into more detail around best practices for setting up and managing the board itself in our project board build
article. If you haven’t yet set up your board, we recommend going through that first.
2.3. View an Idea on the Board
Each “card” on the board represents an idea. The card displays some general details, such as its name, its author, and
the date it was last updated.
Also shown on the card are any assignees that have been tasked with managing the progression of the idea.
Tapping the card opens the idea in-full, with the equivalent options as described above in section 1.
2.4. Search and Filter the Board
As with the idea list, described in section 1 above, ideas on the project board can be filtered via the search box and
the Show filters popout.
For more information on using these, please refer to the relevant part of section 1 above.
2.5. Manage Ideas on the Board
The relevant management actions for ideas are described in more detail in section 1 above. Below we describe how to
access these action options from the project board.
Manage a specific idea
To manage an idea (such as to pin it, assign a tag, or apply a label), tap it in order to bring up the idea popout.
From this view, you can use the action buttons to make the needed changes.
Manage multiple ideas
If you want to perform the same action on many ideas at once, you can select ideas and choose a bulk action.
To do so, first enable selection mode by tapping the Select multiple cards button at the top of the board.
Once selection mode is enabled, you can select individual ideas using the checkbox on each card, or select all the ideas
in a lane using the checkbox shown at the top of each lane.
Select the ideas you need to manage, and then tap the X ideas button above the board. A number of options will be shown.
For more information on these options, please refer to section 1 above.
2.6. Progress Ideas Through the Board
As ideas progress through your management process, you can reflect the change by updating their position on the board.
To do so, the best way is to drag an idea card from one lane to another. For example, from an “In-Assessment” lane to
“Progress to Implementation” lane.
In the challenge project board build article, we discuss building a suitable management process, and using lane “types”
to provide additional metadata and automation to your process.
3. Project Manage an Idea
You’ve now learned how to access and use the challenge idea list and the idea project board. We’ll move on to discuss
how to manage ideas as projects as part of a solo or collaborative management team for the challenge.
The project management features can be accessed from either the idea list or the project board (both methods are
described in sections 1 and 2 above), however we recommend using the project board for project management.
3.1. Open an idea for project management
To begin, navigate to your challenge’s project board (as described in section 2 above). Find the idea you want to manage
and tap it to open it.
The idea will open to the right-hand side, and the Idea management pane will open on the left-hand side.
The Idea management pane is split into multiple tabs to provide different management tools. We’ll cover the different
tabs below.
3.2. Using the Idea Management Pane
Overview
The Overview tab provides essential project management information and tools.
- The In lane dropdown shows the lane that the idea currently belongs to. As well as being able to drag ideas between
lanes, you can use this dropdown to select a new lane.
- You can specify a Review date to indicate a date at which you’d like the assignees or review team to review (or
re-review) this idea. For example, if you’re not yet ready to begin working on this idea’s implementation, you can
schedule a review for a future date.
- You can specify a Deadline to indicate a date by which you’d have hoped to have implemented the idea, or to indicate
a date by which you wish to begin working on the idea (depending on your management process).
Overview: Assign and unassign an assignee
The grey assignees row shows users currently assigned to manage this idea. Assignees will receive automated comms from
the platform at key points (such as approaching deadlines) and can be filtered and targeted for announcements. Assignees
can also find the ideas they’re assigned to from their home page and from other key areas around the platform.
You can add (assign) a new assignee using the Assign user button, and remove (unassign) an assignee using the cross icon
button next to the assignee you wish to remove.
Overview: Project notes
A key tool in collaborative idea management is the Project notes feature.
In this view, challenge managers and idea assignees can write messages and notes related to the management of the idea.
Messages can include @-mentions (to notify another member of the team) and file attachments.
Project notes are not visible on the idea itself (unlike comments), but other users can view the project notes if they
are able to view the project board. As such, notes offer a transparent way for everyone to understand the status of an
idea and its progress.
When writing a note, assignees and others @-mentioned receive automated notifications.
Comms
The Comms tab shows emails sent in relation to the idea.
The table indicates the recipient, the date of the message, and the subject line. Tapping View shows the message
content, and an overview of the sent/delivered/open status (if available).
This tab is useful to make sure that people are receiving the relevant comms.
Assessment
The Assessment tab shows information from assessors about the idea. We’ll cover this in more detail in a future article.
Activity
On the Activity tab, SimplyDo displays an audit trail of events related to the management of this idea.
Events such as assignments, deadlines, and moving between lanes are included and logged in this view.
Impact
The Impact tab provides tools for managing the impact (or benefits) associated with this idea.
This tab can be used to view, manage, and edit the impact statements for this idea, according to the impact statement
configured for the challenge. We’ll cover impact review in more detail in a future article.
3.3. Changing an idea status
When managing an idea, its status can be changed by dragging it from lane to another. For example, this could be used to
indicate an idea that is in assessment or approved for implementation.
