My stakeholders want to create a Sharepoint-based suggestion box where employees submit a idea and once it is considered as having merit, a discussion board is set up to allow others to contribute their own ideas etc.
I understand how to set up the form on Sharepoint and route it through the approvals. It’s this second part that I’m not clear on how to do. I’ve never seen a Suggestion box or Idea box set up this way (and not sure it’s an ideal solution!) Any thoughts on the implementation or if there is a better way?
So is the intent to have idea suggestions not be visible to the company until they have been approved as something worthy of discussion (meaning potential value to the company)?
Sounds like there are two trains of thought to discuss with the CEO – is it more valuable to have anyone in the company offer an idea to improve a suggestion, and when enough people offer their thoughts – then the company can move forward on investigating whether a project should be created to implement the idea?
Or is it better to narrow who thinks the idea has merit after submission, and then open up a discussion to the entire company to work through the idea to investigate whether a project should be created to implement the idea?
What are the pros/cons to both views?
For the latter, you could simply have a custom list for people to submit an idea. Then whoever needs to look at it can offer their comments in a free form text field (turn on append text to changes) so you can see everyone’s comments.
If they want the idea to be opened up to the entire company, you can copy and paste the original submission into a discussion forum and everyone can discuss (or you could possibly look at using a workflow to take the text from the submission and put it into a discussion forum – I haven’t tried that so I can’t speak to its validity).
I would love to set it up as the starbucks idea force but our CEO wants it set up with ONLY a discussion board for approved ideas (after they submit). I’ve never seen an idea board like this?
You can use the SharePoint 2013 Community Site Template, a Blog Template and create some workflows to replicate (for the most part) the functionality of the popular Starbucks Ideation solution at http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/.
I built out this type of solution in our Office 365 site to demo for clients and prospects. It’s not that complicated, and provides a great way to capture and comment on Ideas, and then drive a business process to implement the idea and share feedback on that process.
