VA/VE Best Practice: Using Feedback Details to Prioritize and Manage VA/VE Ideas

Key Activity: Prioritizing Ideas/Managing the Idea Pipeline 

Using the Feedback Details section, you can edit fields for project management, idea definition and more. Here are some dedicated fields that can be used to add context to an idea.

• Priority: dropdown picker for the priority of the feedback (High, Medium, Low)
• Impact: dropdown picker for the impact of an idea (Not set, High, Medium, Low)
• Effort: dropdown picker for the effort of an idea (Not set, High, Medium, Low)
• # Units: number input for the number of units affected by the idea
• Unit Savings: number input for the unit savings per unit
• Total Savings: automated calculation field based on the # Units multiplied by Unit Savings

How you use these fields should help you filter and define the highest priority ideas instead of spending time on less important items. 

Why Filter By Priority? 

When reviewing ideas you may use CoLab’s track table to create a list view of ideas all in one place. 

When you navigate to Track, you will start on the Feedback tab. This tab displays a table of all the feedback/ideas you can access, based on your workspace and portal permissions. 

From there you can Filter the list based on the feedback attributes. Each attribute is shown as a column in the table. You can choose to hide or show columns depending on the data you need.

From there you can Filter the list based on the feedback attributes. Each attribute is shown as a column in the table. You can choose to hide or show columns depending on the data you need.

Here is an example of how you may use Feedback details in a VA/VE: 

• Your team may initially estimate Impact (positive impact from idea) and Effort (effort to implement) to get a rough feel for the quality of your idea pipeline.
• The team may work to further define those ideas and get # Units and Units Savings estimated so you’ve got an initial savings estimate. 
• As a follow up, you may go and sort by high impact, low effort ideas and mark those as High Priority items.

These details give the team flexibility to be situational around how you interrogate the pipeline. For example, as you approach the end of fiscal year, you may want to focus on low effort items to get as much savings as possible in the remaining time frame.