As always, we're open to new feature suggestions. A few have been trickling in here and there, but we're trying to elicit the flood...

So the questions are:

• What capabilities would really make your lives easier using PMF?
  
• What would be something really cool you'd like PMF to do... that is, related to performance management?
  
• What types of capabilities do you have to do manually now that you'd love to see automated?
  
• What are your customers/stakeholders saying to you about PMF? Do they have wishlists?
  

thanks!

I would like to see a feature on the load measures screen to only show mismatches on the preview screen. This would be very helpful when we have thousands of records and only a few mismatches. I know we can sort on the preview screen, but this would be a time saving feature.

Thanks.

The mismatches only from the previous post is a great idea.
Ability to load a measure by directly referencing other measures already in PMF.
GUI contol over the dimensions aligned with a measure. Eliminates the need to know the Dimension Type chracter.
Forms to rename stnandard text that are often renamed (ie. "Operational Report", "Target", "Benchmark", etc.)
Ability to turn on ECHO for a preview without turning it on globaly.
Standard Feedback reports.

Data snapshots vs. configuration snapshots. Let's you snapshot the data tables or the configuration without having to snapshot both. This will help with the scenario where you are promoting from Dev to Test to Prod.

Change the default on the User Entry form from running changes to the criteria to not running them until checked. This enables users with very wide access to determine the dimensional values they wish to enter data for before having to wait for the form.

Indicator set selection by user. This enables you to set different indicators based on what's best for a user.

Thanks.
Glad we asked!

Anybody want to comment on the suggestions so far? Which seem to resonate for your needs as well?

Anybody have other ideas?

thanks

We're planning the following in future releases:

User-selection of settings. One of the things selectable will be indicator set. Follow-up question is, will all users need this or will this need to be (as opposed to it's nice to have) discretionary by user?

Ability to load a measure from another measure; it's coming but not like that. Instead fields similar to those specified for user-entered measures will be set up in the system. For example, you could have [production cost] and [marketing cost] and [customer acq. cost] and [gross revenue]. From these "primitives" you would be able to have a measure for [Total Costs] and then be able to calculate[Profit] and [Gross Margin] as well as a measure for [Gross Revenue] and any of the discrete cost measures as well (e.g., [Production Cost], [Marketing Cost], etc.).

The loaders are being redesigned to make them easier, more logical, and to allow different parts of a measure to be user-entered or loadable to make the system more flexible. Mismatches-only is definitely something to do when this becomes available.

Now some questions:

Data snapshots vs. configuration snapshots is an interesting one. How high a priority and what business case would you have onsite for use of these?

Standard feedback reports. What information would you like to see on these, how should they be filtered and grouped, where shoudl they be available, how important are these, how would you like to use them?

Turning off auto-update on the user entry forms; how do you foresee this working, is this just for people will all access or is this to be an approval process; if so what steps to approval do you foresee and what would your process be?

You can rename all things via the files in pmflang; doubtful that forms would ever be supplied by core development but perhaps someone is interested in building an add-on to allow editing these? Does this work as an answer? How important is this to your site and use of PMF?

Nice to have if sample data in measure loader shows a sample of data based on the filters set in filters tab.

Have the ability to extract the preview data in order to match with source data.

Have access to the Metadata of PMF in order to view lineage of PMF data, quickly respond to user concerns on data quality and source.


Also the ability to automate the move of items developed in a developement or UAT envirionment into a production environment. This comes in handy for an auto build process that can be used with the Agile Method.

Hi,

hope this fits right here, maybe it belongs a little bit more to BID, bit it would be really helpfull:


- Restricting the access for users/user groups to certain dashboards within one single view

- Relative positioning of gagdets on a dashboard (per cent instead of pixels)

Kind regards,

Stefan

How about automating the Synchronization process?

Currently a pmf admin has to click the Sync Button to give access to the PMF tool for the new Managed Reporting users.

This would take out the necessity for someone to manually click on the Synch button every time a new user is created in the managed reporting environment.

regards

What about an automated transportation process from one system to another?

AFAIK I can only copy the whole datamart and not only the structure or the content.

Another great would be to get an automization for the dashboards and gadgets.

What a popular topic.

Ok...

Stefan, what do you mean by automization of dashboards and gadgets? Can't figure out what you meant. Perhaps it is something we do already (for example, if you're talking about automating selection of measures and dimension filters, then "reset" - aka "magic" - does this). Or something else?

It appears the ability to move data from one mart to another is a big one, many people have requested it. Of course it's incredibly hard to do because for example if you moved an objective, perspective, or scorecard from one DB to another without moving its measures, you would just have empty stuff; if you moved a measure linked to 2 dimensions to another DB that didn't have those dimensions, you'd be out of luck; if you moved a dimension from one DB to another and they had the same name or code and a different structure, who would win?

Suggestions would be needed. What parts are you tryuing to move? How would you like us to handle sync and out of sync situations? And please don't use the word "just" as in "why don't you just make a synchronization feature?" :-) That's like saying "Why don't you just cure cancer?"

Anyway, we'll look into this capability - sync - for the future (not 5.2). Right now you move the whole mart, it's all or nothing, and you can use Snapshot to do this.

Bob,

I was thinking of automated transportation frome.g. development to production system.

1.)
As far as I could recognize up to now, I cannot transport a dashboard and its gadgets from one system to another by simply pressing a button or doing some drag-and-drop, i have to copy the gadgets, include those gadgets in the "target"-system in PMF, and manually build the dashboards.

It would like to have a button which lets me select a dashboard and then copies it to the new system.


2.)
PMF-Transports: E.g. I have 2 scorecards on my Dev-System. One is for internal testing, the second one is the one which should be used productive. I would like to have a possibility to select one and have it transported to my production system (including its objectives, dimensions, measures,etc), without copying the whole datamart.


What do you mean with sync situations?


Kind regards,

Stefan

Stefan, thanks.

To explain the concern about moving "metadata" from one DB to another.

Measures and dimensions are not dependent on scorecards because they can be linked to multiple cards. That's a reason why people like PMF so much... you don't have to tie a measure to a dimension, a measure to a scorecard, etc. You can link them at will and unlink them at will.

If PMF were to allow transporting just one a Scorecard, one Objective, one perspective, etc, and we'd assume all dependent and independent objects - e.g., Objectives, links, Measures, Dimensions were to be transported as well, then fine. But then we want to transport another scorecard, later on, and since then we have changed the structure of a dimension and added another dimension, that has the same measure, and that measure is linked to different dimensions?

How could we reconcile these differences? What type of user interface would you want to see to enable this reconciliation? Do you want to stare at a screen that lists the differences between the two dimensions - which could number in the thousands - and get asked "which one of these is right?" That project alone will take years to get right.

And what happens if we achieve moving these objects from one server to another, but on that new server, we have not configured data access to be able to load the Dimensions or the Measures, so that after the transport is complete, we attempt to load the dimensions and measures on a schedule and the loads fail. And you then pick up the phone and call IBI and we try to sort out the mess for you, meantime you are unhappy while we struggle to figure out what you did "wrong."

So before we can commit to doing a feature such as this, we need to gather a lot more information - from you who are requesting it.

thanks