Once you've got ideas in a Pipeline or Challenge, the next step is to make sense of them all.  Brainstorm employs "Grids" to allow your review team to sort and make sense of the information about the ideas. In addition to the information that comes directly from Brainstorm like Activity Score and User Ratings, your Review Team can create custom fields that are relevant to its evaluation process.  While the fields themselves are simple, they can be combined with filters to speed your evaluation process.

Ratings

When you want to make idea evaluation a little less subjective, rating fields are the way to go.  Rating fields allow the members of your Review Team to assess the idea on a scale that you define the meaning of.  Each member gets a vote and the cumulative votes of the team will be averaged. 

When a significant difference of opinion is detected, Brainstorm will flag that field.  Click the "show" link to see a diagram of where the team members' votes have fallen.  This allows you to see who has differing opinions and then facilitate a conversation.  The intention is not to get "everyone in line" but to uncover the differing assumptions that team members may have. 

Drop Down

Many Review Teams will have some need to categorize ideas.  Drop Down fields are the most effective way to do this in Brainstorm.  A common drop down that teams create is "status" with options like "just an idea," "researching," and "released." 

Open Text

Sometimes Review Teams will need a little more freedom than predetermined ratings or drop downs will provide.  In those cases, an Open Text field may come in handy.  Open Text fields allow the Review Team to handle evaluations that may vary greatly from idea to idea.  A popular Open Text field is "Next Steps" where the review team can type in a set of actions that need to be taken for the idea to move forward.

Filtering

Once you have your custom fields in place, you can use them to create different views of the ideas in your pipeline or challenge.  Adding filters allows you to narrow in on the ideas that matter for a particular situation.  For example, you could create a filter to show the set of ideas that have a "strategic fit" greater than 4 and "effort" less than 2.  This would represent the set of ideas that the review team collectively feels are highly strategic, but easy to do. You can also save these views for easy access later.