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, 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 to leverage innovations and improvement potentials in companies.

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 Fusion Agility application.

Idea Contributor

Idea Contributor has access to BMC Helix Digital Workplace and Fusion Agility Suite application. Idea Contributor can create ideas from both consoles. Can view, vote, and add activity notes in ideas created him/her and other contributors as well. Idea Contributor can only edit ideas created by him/her.

Idea Manager

Idea Manager has all access to Idea Management Console. Idea Manager can create/edit, Accept/Reject Ideas created by him/her and ideas where he/she is the Idea Manager. By default, a new idea created has been assigned to Idea Manager which is without a Portfolio. Idea Manager can view Demands Workspace Console.

Portfolio Manager

The portfolio Manager can edit ideas into the portfolios which are assigned as Portfolio Manager. The portfolio manager can also create new ideas from BMC Helix Digital Workplace and Fusion Agility Suite. The portfolio manager can view, vote, and add activity notes in ideas created by him/her 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.

Idea contributor logins into BMC Helix Digital Workplace console and goes to Idea-management-console to create the idea with required parameters.
Idea contributor creates new ideas by following the steps in Creating-ideas.
The idea gets created and is now in 'Below Review Threshold' status.
Idea contributor now needs to let all know about new ideas entered. Contributors who have access to BMC Helix Digital Workplace can see/sort ideas based on the newly added ones.
Anyone who accesses an Idea can vote up or vote down by following the steps Voting-for-an-idea. Other employees provide additional information about the idea such as feedback: Viewing-idea-activities-and-adding-activity-notes.
The idea gets assigned to the idea manager by default specified in Idea-Settings.
When the idea review threshold matches the voting counts, then the idea goes in 'Under Review' status automatically. The idea manager can also put the idea status as 'Under Review' manually by following the steps Changing-idea-statuses.
The idea manager now starts reviewing the idea with all the details entered by the idea contributor: Viewing-and-updating-idea-details.
The idea manager accepts the idea after analyzing if the idea has enough details/voting on the requirements by following the steps Accepting-or-rejecting-ideas.
The idea goes 'In Backlog' status with corresponding new Demand/Requirement getting automatically generated for this idea.
When the requirement is 'In Project' (a task is generated in a project), or the demand is 'Assesed', the idea is updated to 'Next Release' automatically.
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:

Security Label name	Description
Idea Owner	Access to the idea except for type, source, and threshold information. Grants write access to modify the idea except for the status. The permission is assigned to the submitter when the idea is created.
Idea Assignee	Access to all information of the idea, and grants write access to modify all fields, status included. The permission is assigned to the Idea Manager who can change the assignments.
Portfolio Assignee	Access to all information of the idea, and grants write access to modify all fields, status included. The permission is assigned to the Portfolio Manager of the portfolio if the idea belongs to a portfolio. The assignments are updated automatically when the portfolio changes the portfolio manager.