Time Spent on Idea Management

One reason given for not supporting an Idea Management project is that individuals will spend too much time in the system, and not enough time doing their own work.

A manager may raise this concern particularly if the topics fall outside of the manager's own area of interest. The presumption is that people are either wasting their time, or are spending valuable hours working on off-topic activities.

Imaginatik Research has conducted a study of two Idea Central implementations (consumer goods and a services company) to find out how much time people really spend in the system. There were 380 users and 16 reviewers. The study was conducted based on 2002 log data (rather than questionnaires) from two typical events: new product development and new revenue opportunity selection. The highlights for this research are covered in this Research Note.

Q. How many times do individuals visit an event during its duration ("sessions")?

A. The average number of sessions per individual is 1.73 over the course of a 4-week event. 68% of participants visited the event a single time. In contrast, members of the review team typically visit Idea Central 15 or more times during the course of an event, particularly if they are using Idea Central as the main vehicle for conducting reviews. In 'non-reviewed events', where the review team merely exports the data to a document or spreadsheet, the number of sessions is more in line with the number of contributor sessions.

Q. What is the average amount of time spent per session?

A. The average time spent per non-reviewer session is 21.6 minutes. 50% of sessions take 10 minutes or less, and less than 10% of sessions take more than 30 minutes of activity. Reviewers spend an average of 62.2 minutes per session.

Most sessions are very short. A walk through of log data indicates that some individuals look around the system and either run out of time in their day to keep working, or just want to visit to find out what is going on. In most cases, people seem to allocate a portion of their day, be it in the morning, lunchtime, or just before they leave work, to visit the system. The data also indicates that the amount of that 'free time' is finite - if the individual has not completed what they wanted to achieve in the session, such as finishing their idea, they will save it as draft and continue on another day.

Note: In order to calculate the amount of active time people spend in the system, either reading or thinking about ideas, we set an estimated 'wait time' as the maximum amount of time a person would be properly looking at a screen without taking action. Beyond this wait time - set at 10 minutes - the person can be assumed to be not paying attention to the system, and is in effect not using it.

Q. How long do individuals spend in Idea Central during an entire event?

A. The average time spent in an event for normal participants is 48.7 minutes. The average time spent per reviewer during an event is just over 11 hours.

Conclusions

Management should not be concerned that individuals are abusing their invitation to participate in Idea Management events. It appears that employees have control over their own work environment and are able to find time in their day to do the work - both an appropriate time of day, and an appropriate length of time.

Moreover, research into the quality of ideas and concepts indicates that employees are able to generate high value concepts with only minimal time commitment. This leads us to believe that executives can use this methodology to tap into a vast wealth of talent, expertise and knowledge without destabilizing other business activities.

If you have any ideas, feedback, or concepts you would like to share, please e-mail research@imaginatik.com.

Reference: Time Spent on Idea Management - RN-0603-1