Vendor Evaluation as part of an Idea

[mmarkham]

I'm implementing JPD in a company that is integrating solutions from a variety of vendors and service providers. One of my primary needs is to be able to identify the products / vendors associated with an idea, and then manage an evaluation of them (capability, cost, compatibility with other solutions etc.) the Insight feature is good for capturing the vendor... but it would be very nice if I could assign a more formal evaluation as a sub-task, and then capture the results to store along with the original idea.

Is this a common use case?

What's the best way to go about it?

TIA 

Matt

[Omer Meshar]

How about creating a Jira ticket for the evaluation, and linking it to the idea?

[mmarkham]

I've experimented with that, I want to track the work (and the Jira ticket is good for that) but more importantly the identification and evaluation of vendors / applications is a critical step that many of our ideas need to pass through, and they shouldn't be able to progress until a thorough evaluation has been complete.

Ideally JPD would:

• Be able to track whether or not an application and/or hardware solution is required in order to implement the idea
• Be able to capture the application and/or hardware solutions that have been identified as potential parts of the implementation of the idea (insights is a step in the right direction here)
• Track tasks associated with evaluation of applications and/or hardware (via links to Jira)
• Record the degree to which applications and/or hardware solutions meet the business requirements associated with the idea (fit / gap / cost etc.)

While this can be done free-form by typing into the body of the Idea record, it would be REALLY helpful if there was a more structured data model that could be used to show:

• What ideas are going to require a solution evaluation?
• What ideas have outstanding evaluation tasks?
• What solutions have been selected and why?

etc.

Matt

[Omer Meshar]

How about using the workflow and statuses to mark those that need to go through evaluation? This way, you can setup the workflow so that if an idea is evaluated, it cannot progress until the evaluation was completed (which is another status, or another field you can use to make sure it is in a certain state to allow the transition).

We use JPD to work on the biggest ideas towards a PI planning, and we use statuses and custom fields to capture their current state, what additional processes they need to go through and as such.

I would try to use the workflow and custom fields in order to capture and enable the flow you need + link jira items for the different tasks (as long as there are no sub tasks for ideas).

[mmarkham]

In addition - there are often people engaged in the vendor evaluation who aren't otherwise users of JPD - I would like to be able to collect feedback scores and comments from them to attach to the evaluation.