Knowledge Base/Support/Tips & Tricks

Using the People Grid to reach out to innovators

Tad Milbourn
posted this on August 05, 2011 15:47

The People Grid is designed to let you better understand your fellow Brainstorm users.  All users in your Brainstorm are initially available on the grid and you can sort the users by each of the grid's columns.  But, that's just the surface.  Through filtering, exporting, and sending messages, the People Grid can become a key tool for managing a successful innovation program.

peoplegrid.png

Custom Leaderboards

Celebrating success is a great way to encourage participation in your innovation program.  Using the People Grid, you can focus on the folks that are making an impact across the organization.  Here's an example of how you can find out the most active folks in various parts of the organization:

  1. Click "filters & views" in the upper right corner of the grid
  2. Click "add a new filter" in the panel that slides out
  3. Select "Role" from the dropdown
  4. Select "Contains Text"
  5. Type in "marketing" (or whatever other job might be prevalent in your organization)
  6. Hit "create"
  7. Sort the grid by "All-time activity"

This will give you the top innovators in the role you selected.  You can use a similar technique to filter by organization (i.e. North America Sales, Human Resources, Engineering) or by skills (i.e. public speaking, forecasting, design). 

Filters can also be combined to create more granular views.  For example, if you applied a filter on the "Organization" field and a filter on the "Skills" field, you could get a view of "The top mobile innovators in our product group." 

Note: You can save views for future reference by clicking the "save this view" button in the upper right part of the grid.  This way, you don't have to configure your filters every time you come to the grid. 

Reaching out to a group

Brainstorm is all about turning ideas into action.  That's why we included a "send message" button so you can spur your fellow innovators to action.  Located in the bottom right corner, "send message" allows you to reach out to those that are currently in loaded into your grid. 

Some examples of how you could use this include: informing the Engineering organization about a new challenge in Brainstorm, seeing if anyone skilled in "product management" can help an idea, surveying those that have used Brainstorm in the past two months about their experience.