Idea Management Overview

Idea Management is the process of capturing, evaluating, and prioritizing ideas and feedback. 

Idea management is a tool that helps organizations to gather ideas from their employees, customers, and partners evaluate those ideas, and deploy them to the market faster and increase productivity. This way decentralized innovation culture is promoted within the organization.  

Idea Management is fully integrated with BMC Helix Digital Workplace for easy access.  

Ideas lead to:

• Idea archive
• Innovation Management
• Continuous Enhancement Process 

Idea contribution is possible for all employees requesting from BMC Helix Digital Workplace. It is a community to create, comment on, and vote on ideas that can be used by thousands of people within a company. 

Idea Management Roles

The following end-user roles are for the Idea Management module of the Portfolio Management application. 

Idea Contributor 

Idea Contributor has access to BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Portfolio Management application. Idea Contributors can create ideas from both consoles. They can view, vote and add activity notes in ideas created by them and other contributors as well. But they can only edit ideas created by them.

Idea Manager

Idea Manager has all access to Idea Management Console. Idea Managers can create/edit, accept/reject Ideas created by them and ideas where they are the Idea Manager. By default, a new idea which is created without a Portfolio, has been assigned to Idea Manager. Idea Manager can view Demands Workspace Console as well.

Portfolio Manager

The ideas present under portfolios and programs can be edited by their respective, assigned Portfolio Managers or Program Assignees. The portfolio manager can also create new ideas from BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Portfolio Management application. They can view, vote, and add activity notes in ideas created by them and other contributors as well.

End-to-end process

The following figure provides an overview of the idea lifecycle.

The idea management process consists of the following procedures for handling new ideas from users.

1. Idea contributor logs in to the BMC Helix Digital Workplace console and goes to the Idea-management-console to create the idea with the required parameters. 
2. Idea contributor creates new ideas by following the steps in Creating Ideas.
3. The idea gets created with status as 'Below Review Threshold'.
4. Anyone who accesses an Idea can vote up or vote down by following the steps given in Voting-for-an-idea. Other employees provide additional information about the idea such as feedback: Viewing-idea-activities-and-adding-activity-notes.
5. As specified in Configuring-Idea-Management, the idea gets assigned to the idea manager by default.
6. When the idea review threshold matches the voting counts, then the idea goes to 'Under Review' status automatically. The idea manager can also put the idea status to 'Under Review' manually by following the steps in Changing-idea-statuses.
7. The idea manager now starts reviewing the idea with all the details entered by the idea contributor: Viewing-and-updating-idea-details.
8. The idea manager accepts the idea after analyzing if the idea has enough details/voting on the requirements by following the steps in Accepting-or-rejecting-ideas.
9. The idea goes 'In Backlog' status with a corresponding new Demand/Requirement, generated automatically for this idea.
10. When the requirement is defined as 'In Project', a task is generated in the project, or the demand is 'Assessed', the idea is updated to 'Next Release' automatically.
11. Once generated demand or requirement gets completed, the idea moves to 'Delivered' status automatically.

Idea Management Data Access Model

The Incident Management application uses row-level security (RLS) to control access to the record and fields. RLS is applied by using Security Labels in BMC Helix Innovation Studio. 

The following table describes the Security Labels required for Idea Management: