You have to spend the time upfront and think about what question you're trying to ask your audience, because people will provide you answers but their answers will only be as good as the questions you ask them. The questions you ask them and the answers they provide will directly relate to your ROI. If it's not thought through from the beginning, then you could spin your wheels instead of getting something that's of value.

Think about how much time, money, and resources you would save if you were able to mitigate a big misstep in something that you might have rolled out. That foresight is really where the power and value of this platform is.

Spigit definitely increased near-term engagement because people were very excited to be able to engage in this manner. In terms of the timing for employee engagement surveys, our challenges haven't exactly aligned with employee surveys, which only happen on an annual basis. So there hasn't been much of a metric available to know if Spigit has concretely affected employee survey scores.

The platform has some text analytics built in so that when there are ideas that are somewhat related it will try to match them together. From the admin view you can see those groups and you have the functionality to merge the ideas so that they're only showing up as one on the platform, if you choose to. We have not really played around with this capability a ton, just because it wasn't in line with the goals of our specific challenges.

Similarly, Spigit does help you with the end-to-end the management of the lifecycle of ideas, but we haven't specifically utilized that. It is trying to offer everything from the inception of how you create a challenge all the way through how you would implement an idea that comes from a challenge.

Just go for it and get started. We were at the beginning trying to get all the approvals in from senior leadership and train upwards. At the end of the day, we didn't get a lot of focus. Now that we have created a groundswell with a lot of attention, our senior leadership is seeing the success that we've had and they're now getting onboard. So, it just takes time.

I would rate the product an eight (out of 10). 

Biggest lesson learnt: A lot of people have many ideas. There's an untapped collective intelligence which exists within your organization and people want and love to share their ideas. It has been good to tap into that.

We have gone just with Spigit. We haven't spent much on the Planview side, which brings in more of the project management side. We've built an in-house solution for that, so we're tracking successful projects to completion in a separate tool. For right now, we're just using Spigit for the front-end, ideation, and prioritization of ideas.

We haven't done surveys yet or benchmarked internally. 

Using it, we've confirmed the power that crowdsourcing ideation has to generate ideas and the benefit that has for corporate culture. But the most surprising thing that we've learned is how important it is as an empowerment tool, particularly for front-line workers. I gave the example above of call-center employees who have a very difficult job, relatively lower pay than the majority of their coworkers, and tougher hours and conditions. For coworkers like that, for whom it's hard to bring up concerns or issues, a tool like this creates an equal and clear footing and very clearly asks them to contribute and share their experiences and ideas. It makes them much happier to be a coworker here and more valued as a person. That was the most surprising outcome to us. We knew that it would be culturally important, but we didn't realize how that empowerment, at a personal level, would really translate.

It's always good to create tools that allow more coworkers to engage in innovation and problem solving. Creating tools that empower coworkers and make it more the norm to share ideas and to think about new solutions, is incredibly valuable. We think that Spigit does it better than its competitors. If you're looking to do it, the service that they offer is tremendous. They have a great staff, great support, a good product, and a great network of peers to collaborate with as well.

It does take a little bit of moderation, typically, to combine ideas or sometimes remove an idea if it's truly a duplicate. We have talked to other Spigit customers about best practices around how to address that. There are certain challenges where that's more of the issue. For example, one of our challenges — even though we only had around 300 people as our target audience and, of that, we had 60 percent of people participate — we ended up with 127 ideas. And when there are so many ideas, it's really impossible for everyone to read all the ideas before they submit. In challenges with a lot of ideas, we tend to have duplicate ideas.

Initially, we didn't know what to do with those. But we've used the moderation features to combine, join, or delete ideas. One thing that has been really helpful is that before coworkers submit an idea, they hit a click box indicating that they understand that if the idea, or a similar idea, has already been submitted, it might be merged with another idea or removed. That avoids the issue of, "What happened to my idea?" or, when an idea wins, of "Hey, why did that one win when I submitted the same thing? What happened to mine?" That's been really helpful. There is no way to fully automated that because you do need to use some human moderator judgment to determine how similar ideas are.

The process of consolidating duplicate responses from employees doesn't affect our administrative overhead very much. It's really just during the idea-submission phase which, typically for us for a fast challenge, is a day, but usually more like a week or two weeks. 

From our six main challenges we've had, respectively, 30 ideas submitted, 127, 123, 72, 53, and 27 ideas submitted out of an audience that has ranged from 2,000 to 3,500 visitors. So we've had a good ratio of visitors to ideas. But because these are still relatively small groups — we've only done one group larger than 600 people — we have ended up not having a huge number of ideas per challenge. So it's relatively easy for the moderators to check a few times a day, quickly, to see the ideas. And they really just need to look at the new ideas submitted since they've already seen the previous ones. Not all of our challenges had duplicate ideas. It really doesn't take much to manage it.

Of those visitors, we have around 70 to 75 percent of them being active participants on challenges, on average. It has run the gamut across different business segments for us. We've used it within our transmission company, we've used it within our experience group, we've used it across our whole IT organization. We've used it in our business and corporate services organization. It has been used by everyone from presidents of companies down to the front- line workers, and everyone in between.

We're particularly looking forward to being able to turn these ideas around and implement them straight into our Planview solution, which is part of the reason why we switched to Projectplace to do that. It's very easy within the tool to manage ideas through the different processes and generate reports. For internal customers who are running a challenge, it's very easy to give them either a PDF or an Excel sheet with the ideas for them to manage in other solutions, if they don't have the Planview solution or don't want to continue using it. Because of the ease of taking those ideas and continuing to use the Planview tracking and resources, or to do so in another setting, we've been very pleased.

Think about the ease of use. It's like you're having an ideation meeting or solution meeting and you can only talk to so many people at that meeting and get the information you need. With this platform, you're able to narrow that down. 

When you're engaging the organization as a whole, change implementation becomes easier with this. When you use this platform, you're able to crowdsource. You get that benefit. You're also able to see what the floor is going to be willing to accept, what colleagues are willing to accept, and you're not just implementing another idea.

You're implementing an idea or process change that actually works. I would look into the ease of use and efficiency as far as how long it will take you to set up the platform and use it. Or, will it be complicated or more time consuming than just hosting a meeting with a few people? That's what you have to look into.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). 

I would definitely say have a conversation. Talk about your specific needs for the platform because there are some things that you can investigate, like other creative ways of using the platform that maybe we haven't thought about. Having that initial conversation going through, seeing a demo, and experiencing it on your own, it will enable you to have that better knowledge and decision-making.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10), because of the issues that we've had with the upgrade stuff. 

This is a great platform that is another communication channel for our teammates.

We use the solution’s Insight analytics platform. However, our usage on it isn't that great.

I know that it does have the capability for end-to-end management on the lifecycle of ideas, but we just haven't leveraged that yet.

We have a robust survey and customer engagement platform. I wouldn't imagine the solution would be tied to that platform or move the needle on it at all.

I would rate the product as a seven (out of 10).

Ensure you have willing and engaged sponsors. That makes all the difference in the world.

The biggest lesson learnt is that culture is a big consideration with how well the program will be adopted.

The solution is a 10 (out of 10). I enjoy using the product.

My advice is to really know what is most important to you. For my team its idea management: front-end collaboration and transparency for the innovators and, on the back end, being able to manage an idea. We want to go from recognizing an idea that has potential, to tracking it through its life cycle. You have to know what you want the platform to do for you.

Do you want really good engagement or really good administrative tools that will help you track an idea? Do you want to keep notes on an idea and let people collaborate on it once it's moved from a submission to a graduated phase? Or is it just the crowdsourcing and being able to let people submit ideas that are important to you? If it's the latter, there are things that Spigit can work on, in terms of the administrative functionality, to create a more robust administrative tool. But for the engagement piece, upfront, it works well.

We use the solution’s Insight analytics platform and since we're only using it for initiatives and challenges, it works fine. We're trying to understand what is a best practice for an innovation organization and what are the best metrics to track. I used it at a prior company to track engagement. We could see, out of X number of employees, how many were active on the platform. That was a good figure to report on to help track innovation culture. In my current organization, we're still figuring it out. But Spigit does track engagement through employee activity.

Each organization has to figure out which metrics they need to measure. What is innovation within the organization and then look at whether the platform actually measures that.

We have people on our team who use Spigit's dashboards. But over the last year, Planview took most of the reporting off the platform and moved it, through a plug-in, into other reporting tools such as Power BI and others that I don't know and haven't used. Not being super tech-savvy, I would like to be able to use dashboards and reporting through a simple and easy-to-use tool on the innovation platform itself, rather than going out and learning Power BI. Fortunately, I'm part of a big company and we have somebody who knows those tools, but I'm sure that there are innovation teams with one person who might not know how to use all those tools to run more complex or comprehensive reports through Power BI or the like.

Spigit enables you to consolidate duplicate responses from employees, but it's a manual process in our use case, not automated. The part that is automated is the actual combining of ideas, but tracking down duplicate ideas is a manual process. If there were a way to make that process more efficient upfront, it would save us the time of doing it on the back end.

If an idea comes up and there are six other ideas that are exactly the same, I'm not going to know that unless I pull a report and look at them all together or I'm able to look at them in a list. It's not like there are platforms out there that have natural language processing, so that if somebody submits an idea, the platform is already scraping the titles and descriptions to start to create a match to help eliminate duplicates within the submission form. Some companies don't believe in using that type of functionality to eliminate duplicates because they think it's a deterrent to somebody when it comes to submitting an idea.

My six out of 10 rating is based, in part, on knowing what else is out there in the market. It's also due to Spigit not fitting our organizational needs anymore. And when they meet with us once a month, they should actually listen to what we feel are ways that we could use the platform better. Also, there haven't been a ton of product enhancements, although there have been a ton of promises that they're coming. They have been delayed for months and months.