Spigit helps you to prioritize and select the best ideas, although that is dependent on the organization's criteria for what the best idea is. Spigit could possibly improve the idea review process or the administrative panel for reviewing ideas. It's not strong. Most of it is done manually by pulling down and reviewing reports. Other platforms are doing it through pipelines and funnels that are all automated. But it does help us get to the best idea within an initiative or a challenge. If we set criteria by saying, for example, "We're looking for the one that has the most votes and comments," we're doing things to motivate employees to get socialized and to get buy-in on their ideas. Prioritizing ideas works on the front end but not as much on the back end.
The backend configuration could be a little bit easier. It was a little bit cumbersome to a layman to understand how to design some of the customized functionality on the backend from a programming standpoint. They do offer training courses, so I'm sure that that's where they're trying to build that skillset. Another smaller area of improvement is improving upon different internet browser usage. There was a difference between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. The more that we can make it streamlined across browser and mobile vs. desktop the better.
It does enable us to consolidate duplicate responses from employees, but it is difficult sometimes. We are running a challenge right now with two ideas that are pretty close and duplicate. Once they're out there and a significant amount of people have voted on them, it's hard to consolidate or merge them. The merge feature is not very clear, so it basically hides one of the ideas, removing and archiving it. I don't know if that's the best way to do it. I would want to make the secondary idea still visible, but put it under as a possible subidea to the parent idea. That is something they need to figure out a bit better. I would like it to have the ability to close out ideas a bit more intuitively. On a lot of our challenges, we have ideas that were submitted. With the winning ideas, people can select those as winning, while with the other ideas, all you can do in the tool is close them out and set them as closed, which I haven't done a lot of. So, people have ideas which are sitting there that weren't selected as winners and they often wonder six months later whatever happened to them. Even without going into project management, there should be a better way to close this out better. I'm trying to figure out ways to use this tool when doing face-to-face type sessions. E.g., how can we interact with a group of people rather than having them all bring their laptops. Maybe there are mobile solutions or having people sit down as a team. We haven't learned to do this autonomously yet. I know Spigit provides a service where they can come in and do some of this ability. I am just learning about the Insights dashboard. Prior to this, I was struggling to gather data. While I can get a lot of data within an individual challenge, getting data across all the challenges or a certain selected amount of challenges, I'm still learning how to do that. They could have an easier way to do analytics across the entire database.
It's a little tricky to say what can be improved in the solution because a lot has changed recently and we haven't run a challenge recently enough to look at the last iteration of the platform. When we have feedback for them about an issue, what we find is that either there are solutions or easier ways to do it, things that we just need to have explained to us, which Spigit's team is great at doing. Things that are identified either by us or others that end up needing updating, or bug fixes — when we tell them it would be easier or be cleaner if X, Y, or Z happened — they're great at receiving that. We find that those are almost always changed in the next couple of months or within the year.
We haven't really leveraged the reports. The reports are sort of difficult and archaic, e.g., how it downloads into Excel. They are not in a usable manner where other people can look at them. I personally will look at them, but the reports are not the easiest to generate from their system. This is an area for improvement. Another area for improvement would be the ability to modify and update. Planview uses templates and forms that are tough to use. You can only input images, so you can't type. When you want to upload anything, you have to type on top of your image. This is a little difficult when you need to do any type of modifications on the aesthetic of the platform. Then, it will get a little complicated.
Setting up a challenge timeline is a bit tedious and could be improved. in Spigit, the timeline is done with phases. You have to manually enter the start and stop of each phase. When you change one, all subsequent phases get changed automatically but are not consistent with the way you had it. There is a lot of double checking. This could be simplified to: I want this to start here and go for this many days. It would be a lot easier on the setup.
The mobile experience right now isn't necessarily a very seamless experience. We've had several team members bring up issues that they have had with it not being very intuitive. It's like a scaled down version of the web version that's currently available. I think just the layout and being able to kind of access things is not the same experience, which is why we had the conversation with the mobile app development team. We're really interested in seeing what the upgrades and changes are. Those are some of the things that are very essential to us since we do have a large team member base and we do have a lot of them who are out in locations where they don't have access to a desktop or laptop to sit down. Something that is very user-friendly on a mobile version because we have team members who are driver team members out in warehouses. We want to tap into their ideas and voices as well. So, this will allow for an increase in engagement.
When we launched the challenge, one of the offices in the challenges was on the East Coast (Florida). We didn't know that you had to set specific times. When they went to click the button to go in, they couldn't get in. It was set up on Mountain Standard Time. That was something that would have been good to be ahead of and was our biggest issue with Spigit. I would like more of an ability to create reporting. There are dashboards in there and they are awesome. Maybe there is probably a training class or something that they should do. I went to the Spigit training, but we didn't get into the reporting side, at least not when it came to being able to build your own reports. They showed us the reporting and where it was, but there were already dashboards built into the platform. I would like to be able to go in, create my own reporting, and take out the information and data that I feel is relevant. I would like them to improve the ease of being able to adjust who has access to the platforming.
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Spigit helps you to prioritize and select the best ideas, although that is dependent on the organization's criteria for what the best idea is. Spigit could possibly improve the idea review process or the administrative panel for reviewing ideas. It's not strong. Most of it is done manually by pulling down and reviewing reports. Other platforms are doing it through pipelines and funnels that are all automated. But it does help us get to the best idea within an initiative or a challenge. If we set criteria by saying, for example, "We're looking for the one that has the most votes and comments," we're doing things to motivate employees to get socialized and to get buy-in on their ideas. Prioritizing ideas works on the front end but not as much on the back end.
The backend configuration could be a little bit easier. It was a little bit cumbersome to a layman to understand how to design some of the customized functionality on the backend from a programming standpoint. They do offer training courses, so I'm sure that that's where they're trying to build that skillset. Another smaller area of improvement is improving upon different internet browser usage. There was a difference between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. The more that we can make it streamlined across browser and mobile vs. desktop the better.
It does enable us to consolidate duplicate responses from employees, but it is difficult sometimes. We are running a challenge right now with two ideas that are pretty close and duplicate. Once they're out there and a significant amount of people have voted on them, it's hard to consolidate or merge them. The merge feature is not very clear, so it basically hides one of the ideas, removing and archiving it. I don't know if that's the best way to do it. I would want to make the secondary idea still visible, but put it under as a possible subidea to the parent idea. That is something they need to figure out a bit better. I would like it to have the ability to close out ideas a bit more intuitively. On a lot of our challenges, we have ideas that were submitted. With the winning ideas, people can select those as winning, while with the other ideas, all you can do in the tool is close them out and set them as closed, which I haven't done a lot of. So, people have ideas which are sitting there that weren't selected as winners and they often wonder six months later whatever happened to them. Even without going into project management, there should be a better way to close this out better. I'm trying to figure out ways to use this tool when doing face-to-face type sessions. E.g., how can we interact with a group of people rather than having them all bring their laptops. Maybe there are mobile solutions or having people sit down as a team. We haven't learned to do this autonomously yet. I know Spigit provides a service where they can come in and do some of this ability. I am just learning about the Insights dashboard. Prior to this, I was struggling to gather data. While I can get a lot of data within an individual challenge, getting data across all the challenges or a certain selected amount of challenges, I'm still learning how to do that. They could have an easier way to do analytics across the entire database.
It's a little tricky to say what can be improved in the solution because a lot has changed recently and we haven't run a challenge recently enough to look at the last iteration of the platform. When we have feedback for them about an issue, what we find is that either there are solutions or easier ways to do it, things that we just need to have explained to us, which Spigit's team is great at doing. Things that are identified either by us or others that end up needing updating, or bug fixes — when we tell them it would be easier or be cleaner if X, Y, or Z happened — they're great at receiving that. We find that those are almost always changed in the next couple of months or within the year.
We haven't really leveraged the reports. The reports are sort of difficult and archaic, e.g., how it downloads into Excel. They are not in a usable manner where other people can look at them. I personally will look at them, but the reports are not the easiest to generate from their system. This is an area for improvement. Another area for improvement would be the ability to modify and update. Planview uses templates and forms that are tough to use. You can only input images, so you can't type. When you want to upload anything, you have to type on top of your image. This is a little difficult when you need to do any type of modifications on the aesthetic of the platform. Then, it will get a little complicated.
Setting up a challenge timeline is a bit tedious and could be improved. in Spigit, the timeline is done with phases. You have to manually enter the start and stop of each phase. When you change one, all subsequent phases get changed automatically but are not consistent with the way you had it. There is a lot of double checking. This could be simplified to: I want this to start here and go for this many days. It would be a lot easier on the setup.
The mobile experience right now isn't necessarily a very seamless experience. We've had several team members bring up issues that they have had with it not being very intuitive. It's like a scaled down version of the web version that's currently available. I think just the layout and being able to kind of access things is not the same experience, which is why we had the conversation with the mobile app development team. We're really interested in seeing what the upgrades and changes are. Those are some of the things that are very essential to us since we do have a large team member base and we do have a lot of them who are out in locations where they don't have access to a desktop or laptop to sit down. Something that is very user-friendly on a mobile version because we have team members who are driver team members out in warehouses. We want to tap into their ideas and voices as well. So, this will allow for an increase in engagement.
When we launched the challenge, one of the offices in the challenges was on the East Coast (Florida). We didn't know that you had to set specific times. When they went to click the button to go in, they couldn't get in. It was set up on Mountain Standard Time. That was something that would have been good to be ahead of and was our biggest issue with Spigit. I would like more of an ability to create reporting. There are dashboards in there and they are awesome. Maybe there is probably a training class or something that they should do. I went to the Spigit training, but we didn't get into the reporting side, at least not when it came to being able to build your own reports. They showed us the reporting and where it was, but there were already dashboards built into the platform. I would like to be able to go in, create my own reporting, and take out the information and data that I feel is relevant. I would like them to improve the ease of being able to adjust who has access to the platforming.