Your Ideas: Let’s Build Great Products Together
In an agile world, many factors shape modern software development. One of the most important is crowdsourcing feedback from our valued customers, partners and champions. HCLSoftware is committed to integrating those ideas into our ideation process to build great products. Whether it's new innovation, enhancing what is already working, or making something more usable, we are listening, and want your feedback.
To make the process easier for collecting your ideas, the HCLSoftware Product Management Guild have streamlined the product ideation process for all its products to make working with us easier and more consistent. Plus, we’ve made our process transparent and easy to understand for everyone. We want you to understand how we work at HCLSoftware. For example, we often get asked, “What happens to all of the submitted ideas?”, “How does an idea become a feature?”, “How should I submit an idea?” and more.
Getting Started
HCL has more than 30 Ideas portals for our products (built on Aha!) across the HCLSoftware portfolio. A list of all the Ideas portals across verticals can be found in the “Submit-Ideas” page of the HCLSoftware Site here.
You can request access to any these product specific portals by raising a service ticket here and follow the registration instructions. Please use ticker category “Ideas Portal”.
Submitting a New Idea
Once you have been provided with required access, you can navigate to an Ideas Portal and select “Add a New Idea” 
button.
When you’re ready to add your idea, please follow the three steps outlined below. While we want to gather and prioritise your ideas, we’d like you to vote and comment on other people’s ideas, too.
Here is our best practice to add an idea:
- Step #1: Search first to see if your idea already exists. If a similar Idea already exists, you can “vote” that idea and add any additional comments that you may want to communicate.
- Step #2: If your idea doesn’t yet exist, create a new idea and format it like this:
“As a <insert role>, I would like to be able to <insert action> in order to <insert need>”
Step #3: Create as many ideas as you’d like, but remember to keep each idea as a separate entry, repeating steps 1 and 2 above, i.e., do not create an idea that consists of more than one specific request.
And then you are all set.
Ideation Workflow and Process
Once your idea has been submitted, the idea moves its way through our unified process to Product Management and ultimately to Development. First, we evaluate each idea against our strategy, its technical feasibility to implement, and prioritization for a scheduled release. Below is a simplified diagram of our method with an explanation of each step:
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Needs Review |
All Ideas enter the Aha system as “Needs Review.” On a weekly basis, Product Managers (PMs) will examine that bucket of ideas and process them. |
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Needs Clarification |
Upon review, a PM may not understand the idea or, they may need some additional information to process the request. Here’s where you can make a huge contribution.
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Under Consideration |
Once PMs have all clarity on the idea posted, idea is elevated to “Under Consideration”. If there are ideas that are similar in nature to this new idea, it will be merged with other ideas. All votes under all the individual ideas are merged too, giving the merged idea more validity within the user community. |
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Already Exists |
Is this already delivered? If yes, then we classify the ideas as “Already Exists.” |
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No Plans to Implement |
Sometimes an idea cannot be delivered for one or many of the below reasons, and Ideas get categorised as “No Plans to Implement”.
So, do not take “No Plans to Implement” as a personal rejection. It’s a business consideration, not a bad idea! |
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At this stage, we have a healthy backlog of ideas that can be promoted to a production feature. PMs triage this backlog and work in collaboration with our agile development staff to groom and size the idea into a deliverable story.
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Assessment |
The real work begins with Idea decomposition and sizing. The development team analyzes and evaluates the ideas to determine the scope and requirements for implementation. However, due to a number of factors, we may be unable to provide a definite delivery timeline, that is when we stage the ideas at “Assessment”. |
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Future Consideration |
This is the next step after Assessment. Indicates that this is an idea we want to pursue, and we have technical ability to deliver it but cannot fit it into the schedule at this time. |
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Planning to Implement |
This is the most favourable outcome and indicates that resources are available, and we have the technical ability and space available to schedule this feature into a release on our board. |
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In Development |
Here is where the actual implementation begins. |
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Shipped |
The final category is “Shipped”, this is when the capability is delivered into a release and available for customer to use. |
HCL wants to ensure you have the insight and transparency about our process necessary to contribute to product ideation at HCLSoftware. If you have questions about this blog (or our ideation process), please contact the Product Management team for your product, your HCL sales representative, your HCL business partner, or your HCL Champion.
Thank you for your support.
HCLSoftware Product Management Guild
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