Skills and Interests
Overview
Planview IdeaPlace allows users to identify colleagues based on a skill or interest to help them with their idea. Improving the composition and effectiveness of idea teams and larger crowds is a great way to raise idea quality and increase value generation. Bringing like-minded users together to collaborate to solve problems is an excellent crowd engagement tool. It also plays a key part in building effective user networks that can be leveraged to strengthen future collaboration efforts.
Figure 1: The Skills and Interests page
How it Works
Skills and Interests are available within the User Management section of each Administration panel. These sections are tied together, and any amendment to the section will take effect across the instance. For this reason, the section will be restricted to Super Administrators only.
A discreet pop up in the footer of the page reminds Super Administrators to initially set up Skills and Interests. The message contains a link to the Skills and Interests panel and can be closed via the ‘X’ icon. The message will appear in each session until the Skills and Interests become active.
Figure 2: Setup prompt
Non-Administrators will see the same message once any skill or interest is added by the Super Administrator.
To add a skill, begin typing in the entry box. To save the skill, use the disk icon, which becomes active upon text entry.
Skills and interests can be added up to a maximum of fifty per section, meaning that you can have up to one hundred skills and interests available for your crowd to select from.
Figure 3: Save Skills and Interests via the disk icon
Once the skills and interests have been registered, each end user will have the option to select them within their Profile page. Prior to becoming active, end users will be informed of the feature and directed to their administration team should they wish to register skills and interests.
Figure 4: Example of the user view prior to Skills being enabled
Clicking Select Skills produces a popup displaying all registered skills.
As the user selects each skill, they are saved against the user record as an attribute, allowing them to be used for additional features across the IdeaPlace platform.
The process is the same for interests. Both can be added or removed by the end user at any time, as long as there are skills and interests registered within the Administration panel.
Figure 5: Select Skills
Once the feature has been activated, users can start to search for other users with their skills and interests, either from their own profile or any other user’s profile.
By clicking their registered skill, they are offered a popup showing all users within the instance who share that skill or interest with them. By clicking their avatar, they are then taken to that user’s profile, where they can then choose to follow that user, endorse them, or check out their ideas.
Figure 6: Selected Skills
All skills and interests will become keyword searchable through the top level or master search in the header. Searching for Project Management, as an example, will show all users with the skill (if registered).
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Figure 7: Search results for users with Project Management skills
Uses for Skills and Interests
Skills and interests go much further than just user profiles, however. They are designed to be a purposeful way to improve collaboration, idea quality and crowd engagement. For the first time, users can generate teams based upon the skill or interest (even both) of the team members, making them more effective in their work through shared knowledge and diversity.
When inviting team members, the team member popup houses options to reflect our Skills and Interests feature.
Figure 8: The first selector allows the inviting user to select from Username (existing), Skills or Interests.
Figure 9: Once selected, either option will display the full list of registered options in the next dropdown.
Following selection of the desired option, the user will be presented with a list of all users with that registered skill/interest who have access to the site (in alphabetical order). All options can be used within the same team, so it is entirely possible to mix both skills and interests when it comes to building an effective team for any type of innovation event.
Because skills and interests have other uses as well, each section is available to Administrators as User Attributes in the Site Setup section of Administration. This means that you will be able to make challenges visible only to those users with specific skills or interests.
Figure 10: User Attributes available in Administration > Site Setup
This can be particularly useful for programs that look to pre-seed their challenges with strong ideas from subject matter experts or skilled/interested parties. The IdeaPlace system will do the searching for you and automate the challenges’ presence to those users before potentially opening it up to the wider crowd.
All skills and interests data is available through our usual reporting capabilities, ensuring that you have access to a complete picture of each user.
NOTE
If a skill or interest is edited, the change will be reflected on the user’s profile. And if the skill/interest is deleted, it is removed from all user profiles.