Over the last few months, we have listened to the feedback you’ve provided to our relationship management team and incorporated some of the ideas you have raised. These ideas are all delivered under the “Continuous Improvement” theme you may have seen on our roadmap.
In this, a regular article we will share with you here, I’ll talk about the benefits of the enhancements you’ve come up with and what we’ve done with them. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please complete the form here and we’ll commit to reviewing each item.
How do we decide which items to pick up?
We want to make sure that the changes we make to Xplan add value and don’t add complexity unnecessarily. Our primary focus is ensuring every item delivers the most value to your day to day operations, whilst at the same time keeping Xplan stable and reliable.
To be transparent about the rigour we apply, I’ll explain the process each idea goes through.
Raised with the Relationship Management team
Ideas are initially reviewed by the team alongside me or another member of the Product team. We assess whether the request is understood clearly and whether it will benefit other clients (and even other regions - we often benefit from client suggestions raised in other Iress regions).
In some cases, we have to make the difficult decision that a suggestion, whilst valuable in its own right, may not deliver enough collective value to justify the risk of disrupting existing workflows. It could be low value compared to other items (e.g. it’s in an area we know few people use, it’s an update that most people wouldn’t notice or the potential impact might outweigh the overall benefit).
If a suggestion isn’t taken forward, our team will always explain the reason why - e.g. to protect a workflow clients rely on or because an alternative solution is already in place.
Expert review and solution design
For some ideas, we review them with a team of subject matter experts within Iress. These are the items that could change the way in which our users already use Xplan or its related modules.
Our expert panel includes Product, Implementations, Client Success and data migration colleagues. Between us, we have years of experience with clients in implementing Xplan, CommPay, Portfolio and running data migrations. We meet weekly so there’s no waiting for long periods of time to react to a suggestion.
This collaboration often means that a good idea turns into a great one. On occasion, there might be an alternative way of achieving the same thing, or it could be that the client raising the request would benefit from some consultancy to use the system as is.
Prioritisation
The final step is to get the improvement onto a backlog of work, appropriately prioritised. On occasion, the engineer will assign the work and will need to do an assessment of the work involved. On a very small number of occasions, the effort / impact might outweigh the operational benefit, making the change impractical to take forward. For the most part, an estimate helps us understand when the update will be ready so that we can prepare release notes and make sure our wider team is aware that an improvement is on the way.
How can you help us to progress suggestions more quickly?
We often receive suggested solutions - e.g. we need a new field added to a specific area. If you are able to share the ‘why’, it means that the solution we deliver will be a full one. For example, we need to record X so that we can include it in Y reports and trigger a case or task based on that data.
This additional context can help us male sure that once the improvement is implemented, it does what you expect. You do not need to be a system expert or a business analyst, just to articulate what the improvement should allow you to do within your organisation.
On behalf of the Iress team, thank you to everyone who has submitted and continues to submit ideas and suggestions for improvement. We are committed to continuously improving Xplan and your feedback helps us make sure that we deliver what matters to you.
