This is something I planned to blog about for a long time. As some of you know, I manage the influence session for SAP Analytics Cloud. Although it does always seem like it from outside, we put a lot of effort into reviewing the ideas and matching them to our backlog. Influence is not the only source of input we use, but it is one of the most important. It really helps understand the areas where customers have challenges using our solutions.
SAP Analytics Cloud is one of the most trafficked influence sessions in SAP. At any given time there are roughly 4,000 in process requests. In order to act as transparently as possible, product managers made more than 2,000 updates last year. We delivered also delivered features associated with 81 influence requests out of 166 features in total for SAP Analytics Cloud the last 12 months.
We internally manage our influence process using SAP Analytics Cloud and Datasphere models we built ourselves. This has allowed us to tighten our process and become more responsive. We have got pretty good at keeping the most voted items up to date. We still have work to do to make sure all of our submitted items are looked at promptly. This is something I hope to improve in the second half of the year.
That is why I wanted to make 2 updates today:
- New Voting Threshold for Quarterly Reviews: It takes a good deal of time for product managers to do detailed reviews on each request and volume of requests over 15 votes is very high. Because of this we have moved the threshold to 25 votes. This will ensure focus on the most voted ideas. It means the product managers have more time to do better reviews.
- I will rename the project from “SAP Analytics Cloud and Digital Boardroom” to “SAP Analytics Cloud”. This is due to the fact that our product strategy is to consolidate our feature development into one story artefact. The Digital Boardroom use case is now the Story presentation mode.
I will continue to make sure we improve our influence process. Please continue to create new items and vote on existing items. If you have any feedback, you can send it directly to me at richard.mooney@sap.com.
Thanks very much to Genevieve Hogan for driving an team of interns to build our models and stories. Thanks to Robert McGrath for co-driving this process with me and for mapping all of our work back to our development process.
We will make further changes later this year to consolidate influence processes for all of Business Data Cloud. This will be a subject of a future blog.
