Review process for Idea : Feedback

Hello fellow Board community member and Board Employee,

TL;DR : We need more official feedback on ideas!

I know about the post linked at the end and that there is Board program - which I forgot the name of - for early adopted/beta test. Regardless, it's very disheartening to post idea in the forum at the moment.

One of main reason is the lack of official feedback. For example, even great ideas with 10% vote per view posted almost 2 years ago by active/trusted member haven't advance as "Planned".

Are those idea, not good enough? not on the roadmap? planned for 11.2? 15.5?

Why should I post my idea about a niche problem if these ideas that my customers requested every time aren't marked as planned? By the way, these 3 ideas are a no brainer : they should exist in the tool.

Also, idea that are actual done are still "Open for voting"

Therefor, when you open ticket on the support because you encounter known but undocumented limitation and the support team suggest you open an idea, you feel like you're ask to send a bottle in the sea. Example, where it happen to me :

Using Pattern based allocation with 3 entity in row.
Using NEXEL write in place feature and with NEXEL crossview

Do notice, I didn't open these ideas, yet.

I've already create 9 ideas and I've go at least 9 more to be posted. But it's time consuming to document them clearly into a forum post and I'm wondering to what avail should I choose to spend my time doing so?

I understand, Board being very busing working on cool stuff. But in my opinion it's primordial to the Board community to get that kind of feedback from time to time in order to have a very cool and positive vibe for developer and end-user alike.

I suggest review time frame being established every 3 or 6 month where Board give us a bit on feedback on the idea.

Finally, sorry for the rant but I feel there is probably constructive feedback hidden in there.

PS: Am I alone to feel that way about the idea section?

Regards,

Nicolas

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BOARD R&D Team: the idea selection process

How to write and share an idea

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Mateo DE LOS RIOS

Hi community,

I fully agree with this post.

It is very disappointing to feel that the ideas posted are not taken into account.

Regards,

Mateo

Paul Wyatt

Hi Nicolas CHIGROS

You are not alone in your view. Well done for highlighting the point that feedback does indeed take time and effort. Any user submitting a post is clearly driven, motivated and truly believes that their point is worth it.

Nicolas wrote:

...it's time consuming to document them clearly into a forum post and I'm wondering to what avail should I choose to spend my time doing so?

I too can understand that BOARD are busy and I do know that the ideas are regularly read and the roadmap built to incorporate those ideas that are considered feasible. However, without direct feedback from BOARD, it is hard to maintain the motivation required to describe specific scenarios, sometimes requiring models to be uploaded and built especially to make the point.

Feedback is now pervasive throughout society, influencing our habits and opinions and playing a major part in driving our financial decisions - it has become a commodity.

FEDBACK LOOP

BOARD Community user feedback is no different to any other type of feedback. It is not free, nor is it financially without value.

Firstly, the organisation that purchased the software - believing this to be an astute financial and business decision - have paid for staff to develop specialist understandings in order to get a greater return on their investment. The user, providing the feedback, spent time and effort to first identify their point and then to consider and write up their insight or frame their argument.

BOARD gain valuable real-world insights from user ideas, inspirations and questions as the product is tested, bent, and imaginative and innovative solutions are applied and shared within the community. And, BOARD provide the 'community' website to specifically capture all of this knowledge.

Findings from feedback are used to improve the product, driving sales with greater claims of the product functionality, accuracy or stability. In turn, product respect is developed by community users who will each feedback, to managers, directors or partners, their opinion of how good they think the chosen contracted service provider is - close loop.

Nicolas CHIGROS

You make great points in the section about fedback loop. I've written from my point of view but I can imagine how as a prospect, browsing the community idea section isn't a great showcase to be honest.

dirk magerkord

Nicolas CHIGROS

No! You are not alone!

Welcome to the club ;-)
I also think that some more information from BOARD could be very helpful.

Nicolas CHIGROS

Actually, that reassuring to know!

Daniele Di Lorenzo

Absolutely agree.

What about add this post in IDEAS area ?!

Pietro Ferrari

Hi All,

Thank you for the heads-up on the lack of feedback.

Please rest assured that

- all your ideas are read, analysed and evaluated

- even old posts are regularly reviewed and reconsidered

When you see no replies to your posts it simply means that the requested feature is not planned as of today, it doesn't mean it's been discarded. We are very conscious of the value of your contributions and your time in writing the posts. I'll take your constructive feedback and make sure we change our processes to improve feed-back and visibility over what is in development or in plan.

Regards,

Pietro

PS. pls keep posting your ideas!

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Post-PS, for those who like to read, let me try to give you some clarity on how the ideas selection flow works.

New ideas and are viewed as they are posted. If the requested feature is already in our backlog or in progress then we'll answer. In most cases they won't be, so they are analysed and user stories are created in our systems. At this point a typical Request-For-Enhancement management process starts, evaluating a number of different aspects such as: completeness of analysis, estimated effort, estimated impact and correlations, as well as purely technical considerations around security, implementation risk, fit-to-plan and so. This whole process results in a priority and a ranking of all items in the backlog.

Our dev team works in bi-weekly sprints, so the planning of the work items in the backlog is selected every two weeks. This means that an idea is either selected for the next iteration or will be re-evaluated at the next planning meeting two weeks later. Some ideas, even with a low number of votes or that may appear of low priority, could be selected because of a favourable cost benefit ratio. Larger items which require a significant implementation effort (either the feature or its impact) will tend to be grouped with other requests for the same or similar feature(s) in order to reduce the risk and maximize the throughput. All this is common sense - I think you probably all apply a similar discipline for managing change change requests to Capsules or Data models from your Board users.

What often causes frustration is that the complexity for implementing a feature may be perceived as simple and obvious however the real technical complexity may be different, i.e. very high. This in fact works both ways, sometimes a feature that may seem complex may actually be simple to implement, though in most cases the previous case applies :-(

Very often, the new feature requests that are posted are in fact for us part of a larger, bigger development topic which directly overlaps the request or indirectly by providing the same result in a different manner. This is where we find it difficult to provide some specific feedback on your posts because the actual coverage of the original idea is evaluated when the implementation is completed or well defined.

Having said this, we'll put more effort in providing you feed-back.

Cheers

Paul Wyatt

Thank you Pietro for your detailed response.

You have explained the difficulties of providing feedback on individual ideas so I wonder if there was scope to acknowledge the value of contributions, possibly by way of a public award to the BOARDville citizen - a low key, fun award. It could even be announced at the Annual BOARDville conference?

Regards,

Paul Wyatt

Nicolas CHIGROS

Hi Pietro Ferrari,

Thanks you for your response. Very good to know how you proceed.

Maybe adding an intermediate state between "Open for voting" and "Planned" would help the situation? Something like "Approved" or "To be planned"... For ideas, Board team decide have 99% chance to be done at some point but the when and how is yet to be determine.

For me, it would relieve a lot of frustration knowing it's coming at some point under any shape or form even if it's 1 year from now. I would have some more concrete answers to my customer on their request and know the idea has advanced 1 step further (or not).

Anyway thanks again for the answer.

Regards,

Nicolas

Etienne CAUSSE

Hi Nicolas CHIGROS ! You are not alone. I support your idea of an intermediate status like "Reviewed by Board team / integrated in the backlog", that would be nice.

Having said this, I can also confirm that when possiblePietro Ferrari comes back to an old idea with news, it's not lost. Just long