I was involved with the initial release when my company first worked with Planview and I felt that it was pretty straightforward. Like everything, there was a learning curve, but it was pretty straightforward.

Once we actually engaged in a contract with Planview and decided that Spigit was the platform that we wanted to use, their team worked quickly with us and we were able to stand up and launch our first challenge within a month. There were learnings along the way. But we had many conversations and a lot of planning within that first four weeks to figure out how we would implement this in the most effective way. The launch went pretty well.

From my team, which provides guidance for our strategic initiatives, we had five individuals on our core team that was involved in the setup, but for maintenance it takes less than a full FTE.

I found the initial setup straightforward. 

We spent about a year with Spigit just learning about the tool. We did a couple of pilots in 2018. We did some tests with some groups, then by the time we sorted out contracts and built it in, our little team had built up a great deal of knowledge about innovation, innovation tools, and how a tool like this can help our organization. 2019 was the year where we officially launched with our first challenge, then subsequently ran other challenges. I found the implementation to be seamless and the tool was successful right off the bat. It's really intuitive, so we didn't have to provide much training for people. We just provided them with the link, and said, "Come here and submit your idea." We haven't really done much customization, so it's been good.

To prepare that and get ready for the first challenge, it took us awhile because Enbridge is slow moving to bring in new software. We had to get a lot of internal approvals, etc. It was almost a full year before we became a client.

In terms of Spigit itself, the setup was very straightforward. There were some issues and complexities within our company that were not Spigit's fault. But overall, it was straightforward.

From the point that we set up the installation and did single sign-on it did take two to four weeks, but most of that was due to issues and processes on our end. Almost everything was instantaneous from the Spigit side. It has an "Apple" approach where, when you open it, you understand how most of the functionality and features work. With just a little bit of guidance or training, and the videos that we watched, we were up and running really quickly.

We worked with our Spigit team to put together a strategy for how we thought it would best deploy across our organization. We met with other utilities and similar customers and talked about how they use it, to share best practices and put together a list of which segments in our company would be the best clients, initially, for using it. We scaled it from there. We've been a little slower and deliberate in increasing our engagement and in who we're reaching out to and the types of challenges over time.

Our team is really small so we can't dedicate full-time to any of this. This is a smaller part of what we do. That has slowed us down a little bit internally; it has nothing to do with Spigit itself. Even though we're in our fourth year, we're still thinking about how we're scaling the solution to make it more sustainable and hit more of our coworkers. Spigit has been an awesome partner.

For deployment and maintenance of Spigit we just use our team of two full-timers and some part-time people here and there. We spend somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of our time on it over the course of the year, meaning a very small percentage of an FTE. That is also why we haven't been able to scale it to more challenges over time.

Setting up a challenge, depending on the meetings with the sponsors, usually happens within four hours. That's how long it takes to get everything that we typically need to build them, in addition to whatever meeting time is necessary. Even when a challenge is running, usually the moderation is done by a team within the challenge area. Our team supports that but doesn't have to be hands-on or full-time at all. We've been able to use it very well with the limited ability of our team to support it in terms of overall hours. We would like to give it more time, but it's been hard to fit into the structure of our team.

The initial setup wasn't complex at all once they broke it down, like what a challenge looked like. The biggest help was they have a challenge blueprint that they give you to show you the different areas that you need to be able to hit, how to hit them, and what they look like. It was easy. Once we figured out what the challenge was, you just go in and use that template. Then, you can save challenge templates in this bigger platform, so the next time you go to launch one, it's just that much easier and faster.

It was pretty straightforward, I think the fact that we had someone that worked with us the first time. We laid out exactly the different stages within our program and having the back-end criteria for evaluation already predefined helped us out. We had also several different training sessions where someone from Spigit flew out and trained our team. That also helped us out. We were also able to conduct different little workshop sessions prior.

We did a premortem to ensure that if there were going to be any issues that we thought about as many of them as possible ahead of time. We then tried to find workarounds, solutions, or ways to prevent them altogether to ensure that the whole launch, then the rest of the whole program was a success. Also, it ensured that there was continued integrity in the program. We made sure from the beginning to make our brand as positive, straightforward, and transparent possible.

For implementation, there probably needs to be one more administrator. You probably need to have a team of administrators if you want to fully utilize all the tools which are available on the platform. It's hard for one or two individuals to be the primary administrator(s). While I'm sure this depends on the size of the organization, from our standpoint, this has been a challenge.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

I wasn't here for the initial setup of Spigit, but getting trained on the program was straightforward.