Webinar: Ideation

Date: May 25, 2011
Speakers:
Elizabeth Kittrie (HHS/ASPE) – to discuss the overview of ideation and Federal Community of Practice
Michael Barron (CMS) - to discuss the "CMS Idea Factory"
Andrew Wilson (SAMHSA) - to discuss the "SAMHSA Stakeholder Feedback" internal tool
Ann Aikin, Jared Macary, Lauren Breitenother (FDA) - to discuss "Tobacco Ideas"
Christian Liu (HHS/ASA) - to discuss technical help, developing a tool and strategy.
http://www.slideshare.net/HHSNewMedia/webinar-ideation
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Transcript

We have a couple of folks who are going to share their ideas and best practices. Hopefully this will be an interactive session and be useful for all parties. I want to introduce Elizabeth Kittredge who will provide an overview about federal communicating

Things the topic of today is ideation at HH asked. In introducing today's topic for the webinar I'm going to briefly cover what is ideation and who is using it in the federal government. Why is it important for federal agencies. What resources are available to help your agency. You you will then hear from your colleagues who will give more in-depth examples of how ideation is being used. Let me tell you a little bit about myself, I work in asked the and I work closely with technology officer the CTO office is very interested in using technology platforms such as ideation tools to promote innovation at HH asked. I don't run a 90 Asian toll, but I help found a federal community of practice for interested in Aisha and tools I help design and run the innovation concepts which uses a social networking platform. I'm going to turn to the next slide first I wanted to find ideation. Ideation is the process of generating new ideas or solutions. There's nothing novel about this concept. Organizations engage in this all the time, but it is usually done in face to face settings like a staff meeting or a receipt -- a retreat you can take advantage of crowd sourcing technologies into ways. The organization can expand the number of people who can contribute to good ideas now you have the expertise of the your entire staff or stakeholder-based. Ideation expands the time frame that people can contribute their ideas anytime during the work day. Ideation tools offer of the leader Post questions and challenges, the ability to submit new ideas and search previously submitted ideas, the ability to discuss ideas and expand upon them, the ability to vote ideas up or down and the ability to ideas and interests.

The importance of ideation tools in the current environment. Most of the in transit is the from the open to government directive called -- public feedback mechanisms into their operation and enhanced call operation and collaboration among employees. Too early uses of ideation platforms these were State Department sounding board tool and transportation security administration idea factory. White House innovation policy group that I was a member of the we set up a committee to study these uses and we developed a white paper I will be happy to send anyone who's interested. These are good for engaging staff in problem solving. The administration has done a lot to foster these tools in federal agencies. GS a has made use of voice available to all federal agencies. There's been an explosion of federal agencies using these tools. A couple of examples, transportation administration's back idea factory is the most mature tool. It was launched in 2007 and has been used for almost 4 years. TSA uses this as a key communication for all of their employees. To give the foot soldiers who are on the ground to help improve the security operation at airports. The tool has been very successful. They get about 12,000 visitors to the site each day, with 400 new users each week, they averaged 10 new ideas each day. It they've implemented 75 of these new ideas, so one or two a month. An example of one of the ideas that came from a dim -- an employee was a the development of family-friendly security lanes at airports. They have five full-time staff that are dedicated to this program. I think that's why it's been so successful. The sounding board is the State Department's tool was developed in 2009 as a mechanism to give employees a voice to bring their constructive ideas to the secretary. One of the staff from the State Department has that this tool helps with watercooler ideas. One of the suggestions was that they give loaner bicycles to State Department employees as a mechanism for getting around town. That idea was adopted as opposed to employees using their own car or cab. This is an example of using this ideation tool to gather information from the employee base. Hides ideas in action is an example of a text terminal tool. We have internal tools and extra all tools -- extern old tools. I'd like to comment on some of the benefits of the tools that I've observed. One of the themes I hear over and over again from organizations is the best ideas come from unexpected places and people.. Ideation tools can help find the diamonds in the rough and give all staff of voice to contribute good ideas regardless of their rank or place in the organization. Ideation tools can be used in a challenge impassively with a pointed come -- Russian from leadership. One of the employees save $2 million for the organization. They move from paper earnings and lease statements to electronic ones. That was a $2 million cost savings. The third benefit is that ideation tools has -- can be used for building the employee and stakeholder morale. They are particularly power from old evaders when stakeholder see their ideas are being used. GSA has developed a monthly newsletter which highlight success stories they also invite the ideas submit or is to come to headquarters to help -- participate in the implementation phase. Seeing that progress helps foster a situation where people continue to give good ideas. A couple of resources that are unavailable to the HHS community. The enter governmental community of practice this group was founded as a result of the white paper. As we were writing this white paper on ideation tools, we noticed that a lot of federal agencies were interested, but they had nowhere to go to share their experiences or questions. We developed I cop to be a state environment to ask questions, brainstorm. We now have 200 people on the mailing list from over 45 agencies we need regularly on the second Tuesday of each month as a webinar or in person. If you are interested, the contact name is on the slide. We have a portal on I cop where we keep all of the meeting information and all the documents that we've developed and collected is a very par awful resource. There are terms of service, legal agreements, how people do it valuations. I also want to mention that GSA on their how-to website they are going to have a section on ideation tool, with short videos commentating on benefits and strengths and weaknesses of programs. We have a small internal consulting team. This can help you think through ideation tools and how to get the tools up and running I'm going to pass this on to Mike to talk about the idea factory.

Thanks, I wanted Shaq can everyone hear me?

I can hear you

I really appreciate the opportunity to address this audience again I know is like to start by noting as CMS moved into a pilot program for HHS or internal ideation. I probably would not be here without all the support I've received. Kathleen was planning on joining me but took vacation with her grandchildren, so she left it to me to try to cover some of the simpler elements of why we felt our process here was successful here at CM asked. You will note we opted internal lead to use as our program title the idea factory. It is not the same processor program that was used by GS a. We ended up finding the same title that was used elsewhere. , In terms of getting started, HHS was looking for an operating division to serve as a pilot program at our head of all I ask was a member of the HHS innovation panel or counsel and brought the project to us. I work in the office of operations management which covers everything from human be -- human resources, building management. Julie Bond came to my boss and discussed what we might be able to do his business owner to watch an internal ideation process to benefit the organization and number of ways. We benefited initially. Senior leadership is absolutely necessary and up -- most important to the success of the program. We did develop a collaborative effort. We did not have an in-house unit dedicated to ideation. We formed a collaborative work group across three major components for the purpose of launching an internal focused ideation tool. We did our homework, we looked at best practices and other agencies. We talked to people at CDC and GSA and Elizabeth to find out any problems we could avoid and issues. We tried to learn from the actions of others. There were people interested and who have done a lot more legwork. We developed a business process model we wanted to link the ideation process to our internal suggestion program. We tried to make the suggestion progress -- program more robust. We would submit suggestions and they would be reviewed. We wanted to open that up to employee input and ideas. We spent a lot of time on tool selection. Compliance is a major concern. We wanted to find a tool that we felt was most vibrant for compliance and useful to all employees within CM asked. After a lot of research, we settled on the user voice. I this is a cloud-based, Web based product. The tool that we were using was out on the Internet and available as long as we could open it up to our internal clientele. We then went about soliciting senior leadership within the IDS leadership lacks form. We settled on three areas that we posted one had to do with the newly created -- program integrity lead who's new to the organization and he was quite interested in jumping in to pose some questions about ways that CMS can attack Medicare abuse and find methodologies to resolve fraud. We also went to our own boss where and responsible for the employee viewpoint survey. We wanted to find out from employees how we could make CM asked a best Place to work. The last one, we went to our grants and acquisitions group. They do internal training, so they had a more limited and focused topic relevant to improving their training purse --. We created it in the initial model where we were able to look at highly volatile and must broader-based topics and much more selective and can find groups of people to provide input. We learned a lot from that. Can we go to the -- slide

We spent a lot of time on some of the key decisions we were making. We were really focused on creating very tight rules of engagement for our employees to utilize everything from what's polite and what's not polite. One of the things we learn from TS a was that any idea that was constructively critical would stay on the site, but if it was attacking or non-was struck deeply critical it had potential for being removed. Throughout the 30 days of the process, we really did not remove any ideas that were posted. I think most of the employees were subdued and compliant, I'm not sure that Jack came back to the rules of engagement. A records management people were very interested in making sure we met all the necessary rent legislative criteria for records management. We ensure that we were covered they are. We left the idea platform open for one month. We did it more toward the end of the year we thought that would account for vacation time. We have three forums that we eventually developed sponsored by senior leaders who took an active involvement as the project was launched in interacting with people all -- on the DS exchange platform. What we heard from other agencies was to try to keep it low key, tried to not over market it to employees. Let the tool take over and word of mouth take over. We had posters up, we had tense on the cafeteria tables, we sent out e-mail reminders. We used the public address system occasionally to remind people to check out the input that was going on. We launched the tool with a redesigned employee intranet. We spearheaded that whole process by launching the intranet site concurrently and I think of that paid dividends. So relative to implement and launching, we sent a memo to managers of our debt to a chief operating officer. Then we went out to employees and invited them to participate. We established a landing page. We posted regulations and our master label agreement reminder and the rules of engagement. Eventually most of that went by the wayside. There was a initial level of excitement. We answered a lot of questions that were in the material. There is no need to overdo it, because people will ask questions anyway. Marketing, we went traditional and viral. We engaged everyone and anyone who would listen relevant to getting them to participate if they weren't already participating and getting them to try to encourage other people to participate. We talked about that manager meetings, employee meetings, new employee oriented a show in, any kind of training class. We made ourselves a pain in the knack to get more and more employees to participate.

Kathleen and I served as super moderators which was like eating peanuts, like eating -- addictive. Our tool, our user voice aloud for one of three actions. You could go in and review -- post a new idea, comment on someone else's idea, or vote and then idea that you saw there. Our role was basically to police the site and our police duties were male -- male -- male. The ideas were all constructive way critical. We reviewed the ideas and comments, we edited and closed questions. We would bunch similar ideas together so that people could find them easier. We had eight shy -- side resource box for questions or concerns. We had set up IT support through OI as. Very minimal involvement after the launch. This is still him we used flash to an e-mail after employees enrolled. Everyone had to have a CM asked e-mail address. The question owner's for the three forums that we chose we worked with and prep them to engage routinely with people placing ideas out there to add a little more depth, to it yet them to ask questions, to get people to respond to certain comments.

Our overall results. At the time we had 4700 employees. And 10 regional locator shuns of probably 3000 employees in the central office in Baltimore. Over 900 employees participated. We didn't have a target group, our target was to get more than the initial workgroup to participate. We had 900 employees participate. 156 separate ideas and 2283 votes cast. Most votes cast at the onset of the launch of the program after we reminded employees to do so. And we did do some work to publicize the link. Our peaks occurred after we reminded people. We are now looking at using the tool on the work group. We're testing the use of the product for Shorty -- order time. And smaller groups of people. We are over viewing the success against the ideas.

Our lessons learned, higher priority initiatives take precedence. Getting business owners, probably wasn't the optimal time to launch an idea should process, but there was an issue of focus. I believe is never a bad time to try and expand communication. Limiting the scope of the form, smaller was better. How to make CNA's a better place to work let us down many many paths. When we were focused on ideas to improve contract training, a much more limited group of interested party. We were able to implement all those ideas that came out of that form. In terms of launching, we think smaller is better. We had to refine what a suggestion is. In open forum idea should, there are a lot of gripes and complaints and personal vendettas. We did go back and find to what a suggestion is. It has a concept of making an improvement built into it. We invested a lot of time on instructions and rules. A lot of that time was probably wasted. We had a landing page that people went to, and anything that wasn't visible on the landing page you had to scroll down to find other documents and a video that we did. Very few people use that information. Most of that was what was right in front of them. Don't over expand time on too much instruction. More frequent reminders in our next iteration. Idea evaluation takes longer than expected. And December is not a good time to start. You need to get more focused and find a time where people are fresher. At the end of the year people are into budgeting and vacation. We did learn through the process that people were responsive when we publicized progress and things that we were implementing throughout the process. Our gauge of success was to respond to people, but the depth of an ideation platform is that you collect information and you respond to people. Got all of our responses were in the affirmative. All of our responses were constructive. I will now turn you over to your next topic and I will stick around for any kind of questions if they arise later



Were going to try to move along a little quickly because we wanted save some time for questions

Here is Andrew Wilson's presentation

In October of 2010, samsara launched. The administrator put out a paper and had tried to focus the goals of the agency on the eight strategic initiatives that we came up with. The draft paper was put up in October and at that same time we put up this user voice implementation. Was great to be involved in this process to see how we can bring feedback from our stakeholders into the decision-making process. We broken into nine discrete forums. There were eight individual one.

We had really and Louisiana State and sustained participation from our stakeholder community. 700 suggestions, 1700 comments and over 23,000 votes. We've had other good response but this exceeded our expectations. We did have some challenges with special interest groups who try to manipulate the system. In terms of really getting out there and encouraging their people who were interested in a particular area to do some mass voting on a particular topic. Nothing really egregious or problematic. I want to focus on real quickly some of the lessons learned. If anyone wants more information about our use of this tool, please talk to me off-line.

Lesson number one is cradle to grave mute occasions strategy. How are you going to communicate to your target groups. From the very beginning leading up to the launching of the tool through launch. If we didn't have a sustained strategy people would have lost interest over time. Once it's closed you want to let people know what you going to be doing with the feedback you received. You're looking at ways to empower the community to engage with your agency and you want to be able to grow the use of this tool over time. That communication is really critical from the very beginning to the very and. We used all our communication channels, e-mail, website, blog, social media channels. When our national advisory Council was here on site, they could participate in the process while they were here. Cradle to grave times to what is your internal communication strategy going to be? And how you're going to use it to set expectations and also help them learn about the priorities. I like the community to discuss the communications and launching of this internal a versus extra going.

Some learned is understand participation. It's very easy to measure success by the number of people who participate. If you don't get a big number people might think it's not successful. If you're very clear from the very beginning what your goals on. Might be that a large number of participants or large over votes is not what you're after. Might be more important that you have concrete usable ideas or you're trying to solve a specific problem. If you get an idea that will save your agency resources, that is a success. Participation always isn't the entire story. It could mean that your communication efforts were not effective. We think that we try to be proactive in our communication efforts but we don't think it was getting to the end user.

Last lesson learned is start small. We got lucky in our first attempt, we didn't plan to do a different implementation than our ends -- strategic initiatives paper. We would have preferred to try something much smaller with much less risk. When you're trying new tools, think about using this as a pilot there is much more leeway to pull back and re-organize and we group if there are problems. That's all that I have here. We've been using this tool a couple of different ways at sternly and internally and the tools have lots of flexibility. You can be creative in how they're going to be used. There are lots of opportunities and I think this is very powerful.

Thanks Andrew the Mac

And, are you ready?

Hi everybody. My name is Ann Aiken and I work at the FDA Center for tobacco related products. I'm going to take talk about our tobacco ideas form. We've been using it here for 6 to 8 months.

We are actually a fairly new agency we were created when Pres. Obama signed the tobacco control act in June of 2009 which said that they created our center and said that he would start regulating tobacco and doing some activities to educate people around the harm and impact of tobacco.

Some of our goals are to prevent youth tobacco use. If you're a current smoker, we are helping them quit. We have a focus on public understanding of what in different kinds of tobacco products and the consequences of using those. We really wanted to develop a science-based and meaningful regulation to reduce the toll that tobacco has on our country on disease disability and death.

Before I even started working at our center, there was a great idea to look at piloting an ideation tool called user boys. -- Voice. It was free and easy to use. We were just getting started with our reach to realtors -- retailers we wanted to create a dialogue with them. They were in the front line of tobacco control. We had a web dialogue. We wanted the two-way communication aspect of it and we also wanted the ability to tailor forums for specific groups. We knew that retailers weren't the only group that we would be talking to but we wanted to have specific forms for specific groups.

We have implemented some of the comments and no see the top one they are, direct mail to retailers was an idea that someone submitted and got a lot of votes. Currently, our using ideation is to expand some of the things I've talked about. We launch this in May of 2010, we are creating these forms that are targeting retailers. We did just to launch new content and product. We're trying to encourage people to send us comments in Spanish about our Spanish content.

These two are ones where we took part of what they were saying and implemented it. We have Spanish content and low literacy information that we're putting out

We get an idea that comes in, we look at it, we decide how we want to deal with it. Some of the ideas we can't deal with. We do take really good suggestions and try and adopt them. We put a text messaging pilot product -- project as well.

One of our big lessons learned is promotion. Were trying to really promote the ideation as part of a log of the promotion things that we do. Here is an example of promoting our Spanish content. We're really trying to integrate it into our contacts. This is another integration recognition example. After we launched the Spanish website we did a number of things to help promote it. We wrote a blog, our director talked about the person that submitted the comment and gave some recognition to her.

This has a domino affect. People started adding comments about the idea. There are different ways to recognize people and I think that's important.

Some of our recommendations would be to have a finite commenting policy. We really want to quickly respond to ideas that people have. We generally can respond very quickly. Were trying to come up with some standardize responses that get pre-cleared so that when we can't write a response really quickly we have somewhere to go. One of the other things which is really a warning, two-way communication can eat up a lot of time. Make sure you have enough time to respond to people. It is really important. We didn't exactly guesstimate that right. We recommend honoring good ideas, it seems pretty obvious. Consistent promotion in an integrative action for what you're doing is pretty important. Were looking to evaluate what we're doing and where in the process of doing that right now and refine if needed.

We're starting to really ramp up the promotion and a valuation of this effort so that were coming out of being in a pilot. We want to promote a little more and evaluate what we're doing. We're going to try to integrate the promotion into our existing activities. We really wanted our stuff to be very in our look and feel. We're going to be doing a lot of campaigns and each of those campaigns will have a separate look and feel. We want to have this represented in the ideation tool. We wanted to look seamless. We wanted to be able to add the Spanish please making sure that we could do ideation and other languages has been pretty important to us. We are looking into Korean and other languages as well. We're looking at possibly developing community incentives for participating. If we can post a video or a piece of audio or a graphic in their, we think that that will add to how people will participate. Would like to be in the tag ideas and create access on mobile devices.

We look at a number of tools. We met with their groups and went through some of the needs that we had identified during the pilot. You can see that the tools are different and they have different capabilities, I'm not going to go through all of them. What we found was that ideas scale really mad our specific needs. There is a charge associated with using it. We think that the added functionality is important for us.

Bank you -- thank you

I want to apologize for us getting a late start we have one more speaker left for those of you that cannot be on the call I will provide the slides and the transcript. Our last speaker is coming up

I will try to keep this short and sweet. I want to talk about ideation tools and thank you to the process of developing a tool or acquiring a tool, the strategy for using one.

And spoke about this, this is a really important part of this topic which is selecting which ideation tool you need to go with. I have a screenshot of a couple of tools. Some things to think about when you look at the right tool as the different features and functionalities of each tool and figure out which one fits your needs. Determine whether or not the government has a terms of service agreement. Whether they are section 508 compliant and other requirements for software and service tools. Make sure they all fall within compliance and fit in with your feature set.

HHS innovates we look at developing our own tool. None of them really did what we wanted them to do in terms of being able to submit multiple items, going through the different processes that we had envisioned. We ended up building our own tool. We assess the requirements of we worked really closely at ASP to develop the core and -- current tool. You can go in and submit your nomination for an animation until June 6 or eight. Please submit your nomination for a chance to win an HHS innovates award.

We look at the backend in terms of developing in a valuation model. We didn't want to just look at the vote count. We looked at developing an in-house module that could assign point values to different responses that were given as part of the suggestion or nomination for each item. We had everything done in XL spreadsheets that were manually tabulated. We designed the submission form and the evaluation process on feedback.

Participation with HHS innovates has been pretty great. Voters came from across the op is in both rounds over 10,000 votes were cast in each of the first and second rounds.

Promotion strategy is pretty standard across all ideation tools. We relied on traditional means like posters and e-mails. Top-level engagement from supervisors to managers was critical to get James supervisors to come in and talk about the program and really explain what benefit people could get out of it and inspire employees to it submit ideas and vote for it

In terms of adopting a project like this, think through the requirements that you have for your ideation tool and what you're trying to accomplish. To have an end result in mind you will have -- be better able to accomplish your goal pico. If you have any questions, we are based out of the Sec. for administration office. Look us up, we are around and available to help us -- out

Thank you, I want to open the floor to questions for any of our presenters

I had a question for Andrew. When you have numbers of people submitting ideas are you engaging each one of them specifically in a timely way, or how are you working that?

I just went to your site and I know that user voice has a way where you can respond to individuals. There's no way we could manage that whole process. We were dealing with it in bulk. Would've liked to have had greater engagement along the way in the process. We didn't have enough time to do internal outrage I think we could've done a better job, we couldn't respond back to every individual suggestion. We could have given better response to the top 10 vote getters in each group. We wanted to give feedback along the way about how we had taken the information and how it went back into the policymaking decision. That peace never really happened. We really didn't do a good job of addressing some of the questions that people have voted for. Our communications were not as strong as they could be

I have a question for anyone in general. When an idea is submitted to a tool, what are some processes that you go through to decide on a response and action that is going to be taken. Do have an organizational practice to pick this up the ladder?

At CMS with -- we followed a pattern of traditional suggestion programs. It's an e-mail driven process we will take the idea and submitted to the component that we feel it belongs to the subject matter asks for provides us with a response. We correspond with the idea of provider. We tried to follow that same practice. We don't do any gifting or anything like that. That's our bottom line

This is Andrew, one of the things we learned when investigating this process, we contacted other groups that had done this. It might have been a really good workflow and decision tree in terms of how to deal with issues that came in. That might be good for the group to look at.

Andrew, do you mind sharing that with us?

Let me make sure where I got it and if they are comfortable sharing it. If I can, I will

Elizabeth might also have some good material that can be shared as well

Elizabeth had to leave, but I will check back with her and update the community

Any other questions out there?

If there are no other questions, I want to thank you for your patience and participation in this webinar series and please save the date of June a eight for our monthly round robin to call in and share what you are working on. Thanks everyone

[Event concluded.]
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Webinar: Ideation

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