Software Release Aurora has arrived

After months of hard work, we are pleased to announce software release Aurora for the Wide Ideas application. This update covers the web application, the integration of our app with Microsoft Teams and a design makeover of our Admin Centre.

Agile development of our idea management software is continuous and we will be announcing a major new feature, as requested by many of our customers, in the coming days. Watch this space! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the Aurora software update and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Key features of software release Aurora

Add videos to Challenges

Available in: Wide Ideas web app | Wide Ideas for Microsoft Teams app

Pictures say a thousand words. However, videos convey a story. It was with this thought in mind that we included the option to upload videos to each ‘business challenge’.

TIP: Our recommendation on the use of videos is when you need to provide clear and concise context around a particular issue. This will certainly make your message much more personable and engaging to your front line workers, and encourage greater contribution.

We still recommend the use of images, but if you want to increase engagement this new feature will help.

Idea Funnel

Available in: Wide Ideas web app | Wide Ideas for Microsoft Teams app

Employees can find it frustrating when they don’t receive any feedback on the ideas they have shared. We call this the dreaded idea ‘black hole’, and can certainly demotivate employees from sharing and engaging in ideas in the future (see 10 Key Lessons on how to Generate Ideas from Employees – Lesson 8).

The Idea Funnel tracks the progress of each individual idea from the light bulb moment to implementation, therefore providing employees a real time feedback loop on the status of their ideas.

The various stages of progression are:

• 1 = ‘New Idea’
• 2 = ‘Under Review’
• 3 = ‘In Development’
• ✔ = ‘Completed’

Multiple Teams per challenge

Available in: Wide Ideas for Microsoft Teams app

We know the knowledge and expertise required to solve a ‘business challenge’ will sometimes reside in another part of the organisation. So, how do you reach out to these subject matter experts and have them contribute?

This is where the new Multiple Teams feature will come in handy. This new feature provides the option to push the same ‘business challenge’ through the Microsoft Teams application to different teams. As a result, you now have the option to engage one team, multiple teams or even all teams for maximum ideation.

Multi-site bridge

Available in: Wide Ideas web app | Wide Ideas for Microsoft Teams app

This is a really interesting feature providing incredible flexibility to larger corporations or conglomerates.

The multi-site bridge feature links multiple instances of the Wide Ideas platform together. This enables you to push ‘business challenges’ to different divisions or subsidiaries, whilst still consolidating all ideas to a central head office or parent company. This provides you total flexibility to which divisions or subsidiaries you want to contribute to each ‘business challenge’.

After Idea Review (AIR)

Available in: Wide Ideas web app | Wide Ideas for Microsoft Teams app

Originally, the US Army developed After Action Reviews (AAR’s) as a structured way to review or debrief events and understand what happened, how it happened, and how can it be done better next time. Since then, it has extended to businesses as a knowledge management tool and a way to build a culture of accountability.

We have applied the same principles to a new feature called After Idea Review (AIR).

After each idea has been implemented, AIR will ask you to evaluate the ROI of the idea through a series of questions and sliding scale indicators. This documents what was done right and what was done wrong, so that you can use that experience with other ideas, ensuring that the same mistakes are not repeated.

Upgrade of the Wide Ideas Admin Centre

The Admin Centre of most products is often overlooked as the end user interface is considered a higher priority. This can result in poor and timely set up processes. At Wide Ideas we consider the design and ease-of-use of our idea management software, for both the front-end and the back-end, with equal importance.

Therefore, we have given the Admin Centre a complete design makeover based on customer feedback. This includes a more informative starting page, help text, improved navigation and much more.

Other technical updates

Other updates included in this new software release :

1. ability to select which groups/teams in your Azure AD that you want to sync to Wide Ideas
2. ability to rearrange the order of any published challenge directly in the Admin Portal
3. mouse over effect (hover) added on the challenge cards under Active Challenges on the start page
4. ‘last decision date’ added to the export file
5. link added for admin users to access the Admin Portal from the Wide Ideas Web portal
6. links added to a pre-filtered idea bank for their idea drafts, ideas they are co-authors of, and ideas they are responsible for
7. ‘Evaluating’ phase renamed to ‘Under Review’, and ‘Implementing’ phase renamed to ‘In Development’
8. Wide Ideas Admin Centre updated with:
   • a new start page
   • link to support
   • clarifying help texts
   • menu option Tags have moved to the menu option ’Challenge
   • updated menu options under ’Process’