Guide to Idea Management in Project Online

Elena Humeniuk

PPM Consultant

Brilliant ideas fuel innovation. You need an innovation management process for compiling and evaluating ideas about your strategic plan. Idea management is the process of gathering, classifying, ranking, and analyzing insights and consumer feedback to enhance your offerings and satisfy clients.

In idea management, generation is the focus of the idea component. It should be as simple as possible for clients, associates, and partners to submit and exchange ideas because ideation can come from various sources. Sorting and ranking the most pertinent ideas about your strategy is the management portion, which entails taking action to improve an already-existing product or experience or develop a brand-new one.

If you initiate the idea management process, you must make many considerations and choices. This article will walk you through the process.

Importance of Idea Management

Every new product, service, and business starts with an idea. Naturally, generating an idea is just the beginning of product development. To test the proposal, the team must conduct market-validation research next. They must also get management or investor clearance, create thorough development and market release strategies, and execute them.

Every successful product starts with ideation. Ideas are creative by nature. Anyone in your organization, customers, or the public can submit them anytime. A researched and validated product idea can be developed on a schedule.

Suppose your team doesn’t have an idea management system to encourage, capture, and assess new concepts. In that case, your company may miss out on opportunities to solve customer problems and produce market-worthy solutions.

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What is Ideation Management?

Ideation and ideation management facilitate ideas’ formation, development, and transmission. This is critical for encouraging innovation and creativity in teams and translating ideas into tangible products:

• Submission: Collect Ideas from Your Audience. Start by making a “call for ideas” about your business’s particular problem or obstacle. The process of soliciting suggestions from your employees/team members is called an “idea campaign.”
• Collaboration: Grow and Shape your Ideas Together. During the collaboration, your employees can contribute to the ideation and vetting processes using the like, comment, and vote features. With the help of collaboration, you may create a high-level idea strategy, making it easier to filter and implement.
• Evaluation: Discover Winning Ideas. Review committees can evaluate ideas after the collaborative phase is over. Those ideas can then be forwarded to appropriate subject-matter experts to continue developing. Scorecards, concept tournaments, and token voting are just a few evaluation methods the advanced idea management platform offers.
• Implementation: Bring Your Ideas to Life. It is time to bring life to your chosen winning concept. You may use idea tracking to oversee the implementation throughout the organization. The best idea management software allows you to create tasks. You can also assign them to the right people on your team who are responsible for implementing an idea.

Benefits of Idea Management

• Sustainable Business Growth: Innovation can directly affect your bottom line. Disruptive innovations can create a new market niche, whereas incremental ones can improve what you already have. Both provide consistently high, scalable ROI for your program.
• Employee Engagement & Innovation Culture: Employee participation in innovation captures business-wide ideas and boosts happiness and engagement. Crowdsourcing at scale may foster cooperation and innovation by harnessing every brain in your organization to transcend hierarchical, geographical, and language boundaries.
• New Product and Service Development: Idea management may help you match your new products and services to consumer and market needs, whether you want to find new product ideas or collect input at scale to improve an existing one.
• Problem Solving: Stuck on a complex business issue? Someone probably knows the answer. Idea management lets you crowdsource real-world answers to challenging problems.
• Problem Prevention: Prevention is better than cure, and idea management is no exception. Gathering and sharing employee or consumer insights can help you analyze risks and identify issues before they cause harm.

Idea Management using Project Online

As mentioned before, project ideation is a way to capture ideas, project requests, and intake. This means capturing the data of the whole process before your idea turns into a true project. In this regard, managers may use Project Online to make a business challenge out of the solution.

Team members can use the idea management features of Project Online to propose improvements to the platform or ideas related to a new product. This includes ideas or enhancements related to new tools, change management protocol improvement, or even project manager training.

The manager can then use Project Online to design a project based on the ideas evaluated and determined to provide the most benefit to the organization in the least time and money.

Challenges of Project Online Idea Management

• Project Online offers very basic features for idea management. Proper ideation will require additional tools.
• You can create a project against the approved idea with a single click from the idea list, but it still requires manual intervention. Many high-level details are not automatically reflected due to the limited objects and data types in Project Online.
• You can’t promote items/project ideas more than once. For example, if an idea has been used to create a project once and you want to use it in another program or portfolio, the system will not allow you to do so.
• When you map the project idea list (used for idea management in Project Online), settings provide limited options against data types.
• Distributing resources, such as time, budget, and labor, to implement ideas can be difficult, especially in contexts with limited resources.

A robust idea management software is needed to overcome these challenges.

Importance of Idea Management Tools and Software

An idea management process can be structured in several ways, but not all are optimal. While the scope and complexity of your initiatives will determine your business’s best course of action, there are numerous other considerations to explore before committing to a specific solution.

Businesses might benefit from idea management software because it facilitates a shared environment for brainstorming, ideation, development, evaluation, and implementation. An intelligent platform customized to your needs is essential for company idea management.

PPM Express for Managing Ideation and for Idea Management

PPM Express is a cloud-based platform that simplifies project portfolio and idea management for Project Online. It aggregates project-related data across groups, portfolios, and systems, enabling complete portfolio and project visibility. Without replacing these tools, it connects to Project Online, Planner, Jira, Azure DevOps, Monday.com, and Smartsheet. The platform also has features of ideation software that enable users to brainstorm, assess, organize, and prioritize ideas through structured projects and plans.

Aligning PPM Express with Ideation Strategy

You can customize PPM Express to reflect your ideation processes to boost project creativity and innovation.

• Step # 1: Initiation. With PPM Express, create a space that encourages ideation and collaboration.
• Step # 2: Capturing. Ensure no valuable insight is lost by recording new product ideas as they come up.
• Step # 3: Organize ideas. Use PPM Express to organize the list of product ideas. Prioritize them according to their importance, possible influence, or other relevant factors.
• Step # 4: Evaluate ideas. Use PPM Express’s analytical tools to evaluate each idea’s feasibility and potential systematically.
• Step # 5: Prioritize ideas. Pay close attention to the idea prioritization process and select the concepts that best align with your strategic goals and offer the most potential value.
• Step # 6: Develop and track ideas. Use the dashboards in PPM Express to move prioritized ideas into development and monitor their transformation into workable projects.

Key Features of PPM Express for Idea Management

The key features of PPM Express for idea management are as follows:

• Empower Team Creativity. Using its collaborative spaces, you can create a dynamic brainstorming and idea-sharing environment with PPM Express. Tap into team’s collective intelligence for innovative solutions.
• Streamlining the Team’s Focus. PPM Express allows you to categorize your ideas based on different vital parameters. Using categorization features, you can streamline idea management by categorizing them based on directions, departments, or impact, which will help transform concepts into actionable projects.
• From Concept to Outcome. PPM Express can be used to track ideas. Monitor the idea’s progress from its inception phase (concept phase) to the implementation phase. This will enable you to perform real-time tracking and ensure that each innovation is explored thoroughly.
• Team Feedback. PPM Express provides tools for feedback and collaboration, which will help refine and enhance ideas, improving concept quality and viability.
• Idea Development. PPM Express supports you in transitioning the idea from inception to development, bridging the gap between creativity and practical execution.
• Budget Analysis and Risk Management. PPM Express provides features to oversee the allocated budget and manage the risks, making the ideation process seamless and efficient.

Benefits of Using PPM Express

In short, the efficient management of ideas is pivotal in cultivating innovation, propelling sustainable expansion, and upholding a competitive advantage within the current market. By implementing a comprehensive idea management process, businesses can leverage the combined intellectual capacity of their teams to produce, assess, and execute ideas that contribute to achieving business objectives. Project Online provides some basic idea management features, but using specialized third-party tools like PPM Express can improve ideation. You can get a structured platform for ideation, organization, prioritization, and idea tracking from inception to implementation:

• Simplified project portfolio, innovation, and ideation management.
• Full portfolio and project visibility, ensuring access to real-time data, and facilitating informed decision-making.
• Enhanced collaboration and ideation with a space for brainstorming and idea sharing.
• Efficient budget, resource, and risk management.
• Aligning ideation processes with strategic goals ensures that resources are invested in initiatives with the most potential value.