As increasingly more people start to participate, you’re going to see a lot of new ideas pop up on your Viima boards. While this is obviously a great thing, having tons of ideas can lead to a number of challenges in managing them. Viima has a number of features to help with this, such as the merging of ideas and automated suggestions of similar ideas.
So if you end up in this situation, there’s no need to worry since Viima is designed to support large numbers of ideas in a number of ways.
The point is that if you're seeing hundreds or thousands of ideas at once, your idea management process isn't likely very well designed. At this point, we recommend starting off by reading about the effective idea management process and then reflect on your situation. What is your current bottleneck for processing ideas? Once you have an idea of where that is, you can start to refine your process to correct the issue.
From the point of view of the software itself, there are also a few things we’d recommend you do.
Managing the ideation process with proper use of statuses: Viima supports modeling your ideation or innovation process with the help of statuses. A well-designed process ensures that no good idea gets neglected. The statuses can either be archives or stages of the process, allowing limitless different alternatives.
Automatic filtering of ideas by status: You can also filter ideas by statuses of your choosing. Especially after Viima has been used for a while, it makes sense to enable the automatic filtering of the board to only show new ideas. Users will then be greeted with new and active ideas as they open the board, while still having the possibility of viewing ideas that are older or under a different status.
Hiding ideas by category or status: It can also be beneficial to hide ideas by categories or statuses. Ideas in these categories or statuses will be hidden by default from users whenever they enter the board, but these hidden ideas can still be viewed by selecting the category or status from the board's filters. For example, you might want to hide Archive statuses from users so that archived ideas will not distract users from more relevant ideas in other statuses.
Automatic archival of idea that don't receive support: Viima's enterprise plan has a feature for automated archival of ideas that don't receive support from the community, which is in many cases a great way to reduce the manual work needed for processing ideas. This feature can be configured quite freely to match your needs but as an example, your Viima board could be made to automatically archive ideas that haven't received at least 10 likes in the first two weeks.
The most effective way is obviously to use these features together at the same time. This enables the creation of a systematic and efficient process that simplifies things for everyone involved.