Must read...Ideas!

[jbailey]

So I am going to throw this out there... We are all active members of the community, trying to solve our own problems... But it is important to look through the ideas section and like/comment on ideas if you think they are good suggestions. Short of security issues and specialized partner problems... this is OUR chance to tell PTC what we think would be good in the tool. 

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @jbailey 

If I vote for the Idea, I expect that PTC cares who is voting so the vote could be enough from my point of view.

But If I am wrong then I will comment the ideas that can increase chance to implement

PetrH. 

[Marco_Tosin]

As I have said and written before, I also think that PTC should weight the votes given to ideas also according to the level acquired by the user in the PTC community.

It is true that there might be a user with a high level of expertise but active in the community for only a short time and, with the weighted vote, his idea or vote might be penalized, but it is also true that the ranking given by PTC to users should ensure that the experience gained is such that the creation of an idea, or the vote for one, certifies the real need, and even urgency, of the request.

[ScottMorris]

I am all for Ideas on the Community and support as many of them as possible. However, there is a diminishing return on Ideas. The community managers closed a lot of great ideas because they were too old, did not have enough Community votes or did not conform to the new requirements for Ideas.

PTC does not report on the status of the Ideas and there is no way to know which Ideas are top of mind for PTC except for the status indicator. I cannot remember the last time I saw a product update presentation that showed how many customer ideas were incorporated into a release. I dunno, maybe I'm not attending the right webcasts or meetings, but I find Ideas hard to search and manage and with no accountability. Some PTC PM's will actively engage on Ideas and others do not. 

I would rather see the WC Champions get a report of all the Ideas, review and prioritize them, submit to PTC for feedback and then have a candid discussion with PTC about the status of the ideas and the likelihood of them getting implemented in a future release. This used to happen 20+ years ago, but the enhancement process has evolved through multiple solutions over time and does not seem to get the attention it needs, even when requests have hundreds of votes on them or have existed for many releases. 

[Marco_Tosin]

This is an example of one of the top-voted ideas, which has been open for almost 8 years, accepted by community managers, and for which no PM has written a line of comment about the possibility of implementing it and possibly in what release.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill-Ideas/Possibility-to-load-SQL-statements-in-Query-Builder-Report-in/idi-p/460592

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @Marco_Tosin 

As I usually say 😄 check the Idea statuses 😄 and based on that view I could say that a customer must think that PTC does not care about the Ideas. .

PetrH

[ScottMorris]

OMG, those numbers are staggering!

• 74% have been Archived (tossed out)
• 2% delivered
• 2% current functionality
• 0% being implemented
• 1% under consideration
• 14% acknowledged

[avillanueva]

I think this was raised when most were archived. PTC Managers were not looking at ideas, time moved on and to freshen things up, old ideas were archived. I am not sure there was a commitment to look at new ideas and disposition them quicker but that is a first start. I can appreciate the pickle they are in. You want good ideas from users to flow in and not take 10 years to make it into the product. You also have to balance internal resources of developers. You also have to please all customer's not just making improvements for a small set or else you get this:

What would be nice is more community development, for us to solve our own problems, make our own enhancements and share them in a way that average admins can incorporate. Too often issues are due to PTC not making a table customizable or releasing a half baked solution. 

[TomU]

Keep in mind that the 14% 'Acknowledged.' ideas were not acknowledged by product managers.  That status simply means the community managers (no relationship to product managers) deem the structure of the idea acceptable.  The community managers really have no idea if an idea is valid or not.

Like it or not, ideas and votes matter very little.  The product managers have their themes they need to deliver on.  Spending development recourses on an idea is not much different than spending them to fix bugs.  There is a very tiny piece of the development budget allocated for these kinds of activities.  If enough people complain long enough (about either), something might happen, but no guarantees.

If you really want something changed in a product, your best course of action is to build a relationship with the corresponding product manager, and then personally lay out the case for your idea directly to them.  I would guess almost nothing is getting added to the product purely based off an idea on the community.  Someone is personally talking the product managers about the same issue and then pointing to the idea (often their own idea) for additional support.  

[BenLoosli]

Along with that, implementing ideas from existing users and bug fixes, do not generate income to PTC. New sales of their products generate the income. If a company wants to place an order for XX seats of Creo, Windchill, Thingworx or whatever only if their software has certain features in it, those new features will get a higher priority to the product manager(s) whose product(s) will get the sale.

If you know a company planning on buying a PTC product, work with them to get your required idea into their purchase request.

Not all ideas for product enhancement come from current customers. Some come from "keeping up with the Jones'" so your product performs as well as or better than what is being sold by your competitors..

One example from the nid-90's that I have heard about another high-end CAD software was that their move to parametric based solid modelling was done because of internal marketing. They said they never received any customer requests to change their paradigm to go to parametric based solid modelling.

[jbailey]

Not always true though. Especially with Windchill ideas. Some of the ideas to add features or user functionality could help grow the user base by providing companies a way of getting rid of other tools. There are a lot of organizations where mainly "engineering" has access to Windchill.

[HelesicPetr]

I absolutely agree with @jbailey 

The potential of Windchill and Thingworx is huge and could be used at all company levels

Design engineers, Technologist Engineers, Manufacturing Engineers,, Project/product planners, Management.

All data could be there 😄 

Someone could think if a company has  just 20 Design engineers with Windchill licenses there is potential that there could be more licenses for a "down stream" part of company, But if designers say no the system is not good as you could think they do not invest to others licenses for other users. 

PetrH    

[joe_morton]

I agree. PTC isn't showing that they are seriously using Ideas as a source of product enhancements, so users don't waste their time viewing and voting. (Maybe they are considering them, but there is certainly a gap in showing that to the community).

I always think back to my SolidWorks days (almost 10 years ago now..). At their conferences, they would highlight the top 10 voted ideas that were implemented in the product with huge fanfare. It was a big point of emphasis - "you voted, and we delivered!"

It wasn't a rolling vote open forever though. There would be a cutoff on voting for ideas to be considered in the next release. The highest voted ideas, they would do their best to implement. 

But it could be that the user communities are just different. How many PTC users from your company are active on the Community pages? I can say for my company, it's probably just me 🙃

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @joe_morton 

I would add just one point of the rules about the voting. 

If you want to keep your idea active, you need to provide huge individual campaign (effort) to support the idea from other users (Customers, or friends).

PetrH

[STEVEG]

@joe_morton Agreed with people active at our companies.  We have plenty of users here but there are only 3 of us active on this site.

In addition, it seems to me that this group isn't as active as it once was.  Meaning that I am not sure how excited people are to vote for ideas.

[BenLoosli]

[LawrenceS]

@BenLoosli, I certainly agree that it often comes across this way!  At one of the training events for Windchill at a Florida conference, the trainer repeated throughout the training something like 'Conform your processes to the tools rather than trying to get the tool to conform to the process.'  Although there is (and must be) truth in this, if the tool doesn't have a reasonable solution for the business problem (even after sincerely trying to make the square peg go in the round hole) then there needs to be a robust method for giving that feedback and having the tool be modified, or we need to find a tool that can solve our business problems the best.  While it is true that companies do this very arduous migration, I agree with @jbailey and @HelesicPetr  when they say what happens far more frequently is that people who use WC are honest with other departments in the tool being clunky and hard to use...so everything is not as it seems as portrayed by PTC's marketing.

Along the lines of what @TomU stated, my guess is that PTC does this with those 1 on 1 relationships, primarily with the huge direct customers and then expects that to satisfy the needs of the more numerous little customers.

[BenLoosli]

At a prior company, 20 years ago, we implemented Windchill 7 with the PTC Quick Start program. As we developed the specifications for what we needed as a company to implement Windchill, we identified many shortcomings. We had custom code written for 10 or so enhancements to make the software work the way we wanted it to. PTC billed us for all the changes we requested, until a breaking point arrived, and our management team went to Needham and had a meeting with PTC management. No more customization billing would happen. Out of those enhancements we paid for, PTC implemented 8 of them into Windchill 8!

[Marco_Tosin]

And here we come back to something I have proposed several times, both here in the community and on several occasions with people at PTC.

Since there are a lot of companies that pay consultants to write customizations, which are necessary to do what Lawrence and Ben described so well, why doesn't PTC open a contest where these companies submit, initially even anonymously to make the voting as neutral as possible, what they have done at their customers and then put these “apps,” already paid for by the customers, on the ballot and taking the top rated ones and bringing them directly into the next versions of Windchill?

The consulting firms could advertise to a wider audience of customers, and PTC would have a way to improve its SW with what has already been field-tested with a very small financial effort, while customers would see improvements to the SW with faster development times than we see with the idea method.

To me, it seems like a solution where everyone wins and so I cannot understand why it cannot be implemented.