Have you ever got in touch with the Three Rings team team to suggest a feature that would make things easier at your organisation? We love to hear from the people who use Three Rings on a day-to-day basis, because we’re committed to helping to make volunteering – and particularly the management of a voluntary organisation – easier.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all of those suggestions that we receive? Here’s the answer!
All of those feature requests get put into a special database (unless they’re already in there, as the more popular requests often are, in which case we make a note that you want that feature too). Using this system we can see what’s been requested, who’s requested it, how important it is to them, which of our developers have committed to start working on it, and what work has been done on it so far (which is particularly important for our peer review process). We’re even able to use the system as a springboard for online debates on the best way to tackle particular problems, or ways to add value to new features.
Right after every milestone release, the development team gets together and uses this list to prioritise the features for the next release, into those which must make it in and into those which we’d like to provide, if we have the resources. So how do we do this?
Our strategy is to prioritise each feature request by ‘weighting’ it according to a number of factors, such as:
- Who will benefit? – a feature that will only help a handful of users at only one or two organisations is less important than a feature that will benefit almost everybody who uses the system. (Similarly, we’re also strongly-committed to putting existing users first: we’re more focussed on providing the best possible experience to our current users than we are about adding in special features to ‘win over’ potential new customers).
- Is it overdue? – we like to keep our promises; so if we’ve tried to get your feature in during a previous milestone but couldn’t make it, we’ll put an extra effort into getting it into the subsequent milestone.
- Does it integrate with other features? – an important consideration when developing software is whether or not a new feature will “fit in” nicely with the existing system. Sometimes a feature can’t be implemented until we’ve laid the foundations in earlier milestones: a lot of the work that goes into each release doesn’t give an immediately obvious new feature – but it makes it possible for that feature to be brought in next time round.
- Can it comprise part of a larger solution? – we believe that one of the things that makes Three Rings special is that it adapts to just-about every organisation’s own distinct way of working. That’s because when we implement a new feature, we look to see if there’s a way in which it can be realised that’s more universal: that will meet similar needs by diverse organisations.
- Is it fast to implement? – features that are easy and quick for us to plan, develop, and test are weighted with a slightly higher priority than those which are complex or time-consuming: we want you to have the best tools in the shortest timeframe!
We’ve always said that Three Rings is driven by the needs of everyday users – users like you – and that’s why it’s important that if you have an idea about how Three Rings could be better – tell us! Even if your suggestion is one that’s been made before, adding your voice helps to show us how important that feature is and how many people will benefit from it.
We want to hear about your experience of using Three Rings, and what we can do to make it better for you! That’s what makes Three Rings better for you, and for everybody else, too.