About Triage

Triage provides a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate management of Idea Groups, Reviews and Conclusions.

Working with Ideas, particularly large volumes of Ideas, it often becomes necessary to make decisions around grouping or theming Ideas for a variety of actions.  These actions are usually related to the review and/or conclusion processes.  For example, in any typical challenge, there will be Ideas:

  • Needing further development - there is something interesting about these Ideas, but they're not ready for action.
  • Not moving forward - these may not be Ideas at all, rather observations, or Ideas around processes that currently exist, or they simply don't apply to the challenge.
  • Ready for implementation - these may be simple, Just Do It types of concepts or more complex yet feasible Ideas.


These are just a few examples, and in practice teams find a wide variety of themes and actions depending upon specific use cases, size of challenge and outcomes to be achieved.  Triage was developed with our customers to make this portion of the innovation process simple, fast and effective by dragging and dropping Ideas into folders.



Triage Process Considerations


Before starting the triage process, consider the outcomes.  For example, you may use triage in a typical challenge to "sort" Ideas prior to a formal review process such as Head-to-Head Review.

In this scenario, the idea groups could be:

  • Review - defined as Ideas moving forward into the Head-to-Head Review.
  • No Further Consideration - defined as Ideas to be concluded and given no further consideration in the context of this challenge.
  • Forward to Appropriate Group - defined as Ideas that have merit in general but are not appropriate for this challenge.  Rather than review or conclude as defined above, the right thing to do is to share these with department heads or project teams.
  • Combine Ideas is always available and the process steps are covered later.

To align all of those completing triage, consider walking through the intended process, the specific idea group definitions and the steps to using triage.


As the individual managing the triage process, remember to assign the idea group to be reviewed to each reviewer in special roles, so only the ideas in that group are presented during head to head.  Remember to set up the conclusion notification email.  As a best practice, it may be best to disable the conclusion notification email until all decisions are made, so all conclusion decisions are sent at one time.


Preparing Innovation Central to use Triage

The triage process is set up using the current Innovation Central setup menu - so you won't find the word Triage in the administrator menu. 


The three common functions in Innovation Central associated with triage are Idea Groups, Reviews and Conclusions.  If using all of these functions with triage is desired, then each of these functions will need to be considered and configured prior to asking teams to use triage.


The triage function is accessed through the Review Menu, and is only available to those with access to the Review Space, so remember to assign the appropriate Special Roles prior to triage.  Depending upon your process, you can make up to three menu choices available to those completing the work of triage: Idea Grouping, Mass Review 2 or Mass Conclusion 2.  


Using Triage



As shown in the above screen shot, the triage tools have a simple interface of a table of Ideas and a set of drop-folders.  The task of Idea grouping, reviewing, or concluding is done simply by dragging and dropping Ideas into the folders.


Triage was developed with common tasks in mind.  For example, to make good recommendations and decisions, you need immediate access to all relevant information.  Click on the title / author row of any Idea to show all of the text coauthors, date, and assigned categories.  Tabs show all comments, reviews to date (including any 5-star reviews, BubbleUp rating, Head to Head reviews, Reviews, Expert Reviews, or Conclusions), as well as any additional data (for example in a FlexForm).  An example of this detail is shown in the screen shot below:



It's really that simple to work with Ideas in triage!



Filtering, Sorting and Searching

There will often be multiple team members completing the work of triage, so we've developed a simple way to work with a subset of Ideas.  Click the top gray bar to open a full set of tools to help you find and focus on the Ideas with which you want to work.  In this example, 452 ideas have been reduced to 3 by filtering on Area and Scope and Scale, searching for “hoffman”, and then sorting by date.




Now that we've looked at an example in practice, let's look at the Filter & Sort options in more detail:





1 - Filter

Filter is available for Idea Form Area, Idea Form Questions with single or multiple choices (not text answers) and Idea Groups.  Each challenge will look slightly different, as this information is populated by what is set up in the Idea Form and the Idea Groups.

2 - Sort

The list of Ideas currently being viewed can be sorted by any of the categories simply by clicking the box associated with the desired sort category - in this case Date.  Notice 5-Star Vote and Bubble Up (and others) are grayed out.  This simply means in this challenge, there is no data for these sort categories, as these features were not used.

3 - Search

The search bar can be used to search for either keywords or authors.  Notice in the search for Hoffman, the word Hoffman is highlighted in yellow making search results easy to spot.

4 - Toggle Details

Toggle details impacts the full list and either expands the details for all Ideas or collapses the details for all Ideas.  When reading through Ideas the first time, it may be helpful to expand all the details.

5 - Export to Excel

Exports the current selection into Excel.  In the Triage export, all data associated with an Idea is in a single row.

Pop-up charts show distributions of categories and properties which may, for example, help you to focus on the most important sets of Ideas first.





Similarly, pop-up advice and explanations are available at numerous info buttons.






Changing Selections

Any of the blue folders can be clicked open to show the ideas you’ve dropped there which may be returned to the main table, undoing the assignment.  Idea groups can be changed at any time, but reviews and conclusions are final once you close the page.





Combining ideas with Triage

There are two general ways to pare down a long list of ideas:  one is to categorize them en masse, which the drag-onto-folders method makes fast and easy.  The other is to combine similar ideas, thereby reducing the number to take manage further.  

Identifying similar ideas is made easier by Similarity sorting.  Clicking this button finds all reasonably similar sets of ideas and wraps them in blue brackets:






These (and others as you wish) can then be dragged to the special yellow “Combine Ideas” folder.  Clicking to open the Combine Ideas folder shows how the software has made default choices for a new combined idea that you can edit.  Notably, the software uses some advanced analytics to create a combined summary of the multiple original ideas.