Evaluation grid
For those who want to get even fancier you can use an evaluation grid built in your favorite spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets.
How to build it
First you'll have to import every idea in your spreadsheet. Then you can select a certain number of criteria that you'll evaluate with a scale from 1 to 10. Criterias can be things like:
- Technical feasibility (1 hard to do, 10 simple to do)
- Cost (1 will cost a lot, 10 very cheap)
- Impact for the end user (1 will not help, 10 will help the user a lot)
- Impact for the company (1 will not help, 10 will help the company a lot)
- etc.
How to make it smart
Then, because it's an spreadsheet you can add a few formulas to calculate an idea score. To do this, you'll have to evaluate what's the importance of each criteria for you. For example we could say:
- Technical feasibility: 1x
- Cost: 1.5x
- Impact for the end user: 2x
- Impact for the company: 1x
- etc.
By doing so you'll multiply the points you gave by the number you decided. In the example above that would mean that you care more about ideas that bring a lot of impact for the user and that are cheap to produce.
It will take a shitload of time
This is something pretty nice to do, but be aware, when you have a lot of ideas, this will take a lot of time, and produce often results that are quite similar to what you will get with a simple dot voting and impact versus effort matrix.