The great thing about Pipelines is that they allow you to collect ideas related to your area of the business and decide which ones you want to pursue.   The default criteria that Pipelines give you to review ideas are:

• Overall Rating -- compared to the other ideas in your pipeline, is this idea above or below average? 
• Point of contact -- who on your team should the idea submitter follow up with for help or questions?
• Next Action -- what next steps do you recommend for this idea?

If these review fields meet your needs, you're all set.  If not, you can customize them to your liking.  Maybe you want to evaluate the ideas in your pipeline using criteria such as:

• Estimated value
• Estimated effort
• Strategic fit

You can add your own fields by clicking the “Review Fields” button below the grid.

In the “Customize Review Fields” menu, you can manage the fields you have and create new ones.  There are a few buttons on the right of any field.  The up/down arrows can be clicked and dragged to reorder how the fields are displayed while evaluating ideas.  Clicking the pencil allows you to edit the field’s name and choices.  The red “X” is used to delete the field. 

You can also create three types of additional fields:

One Vote Per Reviewer:

• Average Rating – For this type of field, you create a dropdown list with 5 ordered choices.  Each member of the Pipeline team can make a choice, and the team average is calculated.  This is typically used for categorizing ideas against criteria such as “Estimated Value” or “Strategic Fit.”  The nice thing about average rating fields is that each member of the team can “vote” on his/her own time, off-line.

One selection per team:

For some ratings, it doesn’t make sense to take an average of votes.  For example if you want to record who the point of contact is, or what release it was in, or what the next steps should be.  Your choices here are:

• Drop Down List – A defined set of options such as “low,” “medium,” “high” or “in progress,” “needs review,” “resourced.”  Typically used for categorizing ideas.  Useful for sorting and filtering ideas.
• Open Text – A free-form text field that can be typed into as needed.  Typically used for anything that isn’t standardized from idea to idea such as “Next Action” or “Thoughts for the team.”

When creating evaluation criteria it’s best to be as explicit as you can in the choices that your pipeline team uses.  For example, tie value estimates to rough dollar amounts rather than a simple low/medium/high choice.    This will help the pipeline reviewers stay coordinated and aligned as they make their assessments. 

Note that these explicit choices pop up as you are making your choices to keep it really clear what choice has what meaning. 

The end result of these clear definitions is faster decision making by your team – even without scheduling review meetings you can stay coordinated in aligned.

Next: Evaluating ideas in your Pipeline