Product Management Application – Accept Software

Per my previous introduction to Product Management Applications, this writeup summarizes the Accept Software solution.

Accept Innovation Management Solutions – provides 3 on-demand software applications: Accept Ideas, Accept Portfolio, and Accept Requirements.

Engages customers, partners, suppliers and employees about products and services using:

Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking technologies including forums, wikis and blogs enabling the community members to share, discuss, and refine ideas
Tagging, categorization and watch lists enable members to gather around discussions most important to them, vote on ideas, or build on comments from others. When a user enters a new idea, automatically searches for similar concepts and guides user to enhance the existing idea rather than create a copy.
RSS subscriptions to stay current as ideas develop
Public and private community settings to maximize reach while ensuring confidentiality and protecting intellectual property
Templates, cascading style sheets (CSS), liquid layouts, and drag-and-drop features that enable the user (not IT) to customize the application

Provides the user ability to prioritize ideas by:

Using community features such as tiered voting, scoring, and ranking
Tracing commitments made to customers at any stage
Running market satisfaction reports to stay on track
Using competitive feature comparisons to quantify resource investment
Aligning each requirement with customer needs, competitive strategy, and corporate goals
Using pre-built 2X2 analytic charts to run scenarios, compare multiple plans, analyze, and rank based on strategic score
Using strategic alignment reports to model options and ensure best investment allocation that executes on strategic goals

Provides the user ability to transform ideas into products by:

Providing configurable stages through the idea management process or aligning with your innovation lifecycle (e.g., Stage-Gate™, PACE™, or other methodologies)
Keeping all data centralized and available to users based on their roles
Transitioning ideas to Accept Requirements and Accept Portfolio
Turning an idea into product requirements or combining multiple ideas into a single product feature

Provides the user visibility across the product portfolio by:

Combining product concepts relevant to planning data such as estimated costs, projected revenues, market needs, potential risks and strategic alignment, then scored and weighted
Drilling down to what and why—from portfolio to products, dependencies and specific requirements
Tracking dependencies between products with graphical dependency reports
Simulating alternative plans using reporting and built-in 2X2 charts, and develop product roadmaps from them
Evaluating new ideas across key portfolio factors such as investment, ROI, competitive advantage, strategy alignment, risk profile, resource capacity, and other metrics

Let’s the user prioritize and align investment by:

Evaluating tradeoffs and build a solid business case based on market and customer needs, ROI, competitive advantage, strategic alignment, build vs. buy, and net present value
Comparing alternative plans using reporting and built-in visualizations
Using analytics to forecast new product performance
Updating with new information and its analytics provide guidance to changes

Accelerates plan to product with:

Flexible analytics and pre-defined graphical reports for monitoring progress and tracking performance against plan, highlighting gaps between capacity and plan
Built-in workflows and notifications keep everyone aware of status or changes
“Software as a Service” (SaaS) solution, Accept manages all the software and infrastructure in their SAS 70 Type II certified datacenter
Pre-defined management reports with ability to customize reports as well

Provides the user the ability to manage roadmaps, requirements, and resources with:

A centralized repository of all market, customer, competitive, and requirements data
Input ideas from various sources – spreadsheets, documents, email, Accept Ideas online community, or Microsoft Outlook
Enabling stakeholders to enhance and refine requirements collaboratively using integrated notes and discussions

Have users objectively prioritize products, services and features by:

Tracing commitments made to customers at any stage
Running market satisfaction reports to stay on track
Prioritizing competitive responses in the context of other product delivery activities
Using competitive feature comparisons to quantify resource investment
Using pre-built 2X2 analytic charts to run scenarios and compare multiple plans, with ranking based on strategic scores
Capturing corporate objectives and product themes, scoring and tying them to every requirement, then using strategic alignment reports to model options and allocate investments

Unifies execution by:

Using a common plan of record and process—including Stage-Gate™, PACE™, Agile, or other methodologies
Providing stakeholders with up-to-date repository, graphical reports, and dozens of other requirements documents such as living MRDs and PRDs
Integrating with project management solutions to monitor fine-grained project details
Providing many pre-defined management reports, such as graphical roadmaps, product roadmaps, strategic alignment, market satisfaction, and resource demand snapshots
Providing visibility to interdependencies across product lines including graphical dependency reports showing the impact of changes in plan such as scope cuts or delays

Click here to go to the Accept Software blog.

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