Track Improvement Requests

Question

We receive 5-10 improvement requests each day from our customers. Some of them are good, and some not so good. I can easily pick out the ones that I agree with, but I'd like a good way to organize the rest, so if we get a lot of similar requests we can prioritize those appropriately.

We have a large backlog of good ideas, so a request usually won't get added to the work queue unless we see a strong demand from customers. This makes it impractical , so it doesn't make sense to track them with our current work item tracking (TFS). The main goal of organizing them is so that we can see where the demand is strongest, and we can determine which features are most important to our users.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Use a StackExchange site for letting your user's create and vote on their priorities. Another alternative would be using something similar, like UserVoice, though here on SO we've found that the SO platform seems to work better.

You might also want to compile a set of potential feature requests and use something like SurveyMonkey, Vovici/WebSurveyor, or even Google Docs Forms to collect information from your users on which items they would like to see.

Answer 2

I've seen small applications that allow people to add requests and anyone can vote on them. This would show you what people using that particular system are most interested in - although depending on implementation it can be very susceptible to gaming. Look into something like UserVoice. They probably do most of the work for you.