What is it?
Many co-workers will face different challenges in their daily work. Plus, new business challenges might also arise from your external environment and a shift in consumer behavior/desires, political initiatives, or technological advancements. While the latter usually is part of your competitive intelligence activities, uniting this external and the former internal perspective provides you with the opportunity to unite these views and identify the most pressing business challenges.
Based on the identified business challenges, you can relate such challenges to your already existing assets, projects, and partnerships or help you to find the right ideas or collaboration partners, such as start-ups.
By the ITONICS Radar or Board, you can then visualize all challenges and evaluate each challenge's impact to find the challenges that require the most attention. This will also help to create the necessary strategic alignment and commitment.
Learn more on:
- creating a challenge template,
- design a prioritization workflow, and
- enabling a challenge board or radar
How does it work?
Create a challenge template
To start with, you should first create a template, i.e., a specific entity, by that everyone can submit the challenge(s) they come across. Therefore, navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration. Use the button to add a new entity. Provide the name and select the modules that you want to activate for this entity. Please note that modules need to be activated by your Customer Success Manager first.
Typical fields that should be included are:
- Title, Image, Abstract/What is the challenge, Further information/What benefits does addressing it bring?, Tags
- Challenge Phase (Pearl chain field with the following values: submission, analysis, in action, closed) Please note that you can set a default value for submission in the initial configuration.
- Key Benefit (Dropdown field with the following values, e.g.,: new savings, new earnings, better relationship, new skills)
At best, the initial intake form should only include important details to not scare submitters when entering their perceived challenges.
Design a prioritization workflow
If you use a pearl chain field and use the workflow configuration, you can steer the necessary actions per phase and by including different individuals along the way. For instance, you can add an action button "invite evaluators". By using a user search field, you can name the evaluators and send a notification to them to ask them to submit their rating of the challenge. This will help you afterward to prioritize the follow-up actions on the challenges identified.
To configure your workflow, you first need to navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration. Select the entity, i.e., challenge, on which you want to enable your workflow. Click on the pen icon and activate on the entity-specific configuration page the Workflow Configuration Module. Please note that this needs to be activated by your Customer Innovation Success Manager first.
To make the Workflow Configuration work, you also need to select a pearl chain attribute, e.g., the challenge phase attribute. Once configured, you will be able to select this specific field or any other pearl chain field under the choose workflow field in the workflow configuration tile on the entity-specific configuration page. This is important as the pearl chain field will define what actions are possible per stage of the workflow.
After the activation of the workflow module and the definition of the pearl chain field, a new menu item will appear on the entity-specific configuration page. It is called workflow configuration and, from here, you can define the action buttons and trigger the actions as desired.
From the configuration pop-up, you will be asked to:
- Define the label of the button and how the button appears to users
- Assign the button to the respective workflow step(s), i.e., pearl chain components
- Define who can trigger the button. You can select individual users, user groups, user contexts, user roles, entity type-specific user search fields, or the persona 'creator' to refer to the content creator.
- Define when the button can be triggered, i.e., you can define conditions for when the button appears and can thus be used
- Define what the button triggers. You can choose and combine the following triggers:
- Phase change: Indicate to which workflow/pearl chain step you want to jump (you can move forward linearly but also skip a workflow step or move back to a previous step)
- Workflow step change: Indicate which status should the current workflow step move to (you can choose between done, canceled, pending, or active)
- Enrichment: Indicate which attributes should be enriched (e.g., text fields, dropdowns, user search fields)
- Rating: Indicate what rating criteria/rating groups you want to be assessed
- Value change: Indicate which value of which data point should be set automatically
- Date value change: Indicate to change a date field value by a defined value range (e.g., 6 months from now) by clicking a button
- Comment: Indicate with which stakeholders do you want to share feedback (you can select the creator, individual users, user groups, user contexts, user roles, or entity type-specific user search fields)
- Notification: Indicate which email template should be sent to which stakeholders (you can select the creator, individual users, user groups, user contexts, user roles, or entity type-specific user search fields).
- Convert: Indicate when an entity should be converted into another entity (e.g., idea to project, project to asset). Please pay attention to the mapping tab to map the origin's entity attributes to the converted (source) entity attributes (next to the 'button overview tab' on top of the action button configuration)
- URL: Indicate to be directed to a set URL by clicking the button
- Define whether the trigger status should be shown by a checkmark or not
Once you have configured one action button, you can continue with the procedure until you have configured all the actions necessary to bring your process alive in the application.
Enabling a challenge board or radar
To visualize your entire challenge portfolio, it is best to use either the Radar visualization or Board visualization. The radar makes sense if you have a rich partner landscape as it has enough space to oversee it. In this case, please note that you need to create segment fields as a specific requirement.
The board makes the most sense when you have a clear process that your partner process follows and/or if you want to aggregate financial data from the different partnerships in a general view.
In both cases, you will first need to activate the visualization on the first page of the entity configuration. Please note that the available modules depend on your license. After the activation, you will have the option to configure the default board and/or radar view.