Today we bring one of our biggest feature updates to date. A lot of new stuff that will make it easier and better to use the platform.

A new way to create users

We reworked user creation, so now you can add one or multiple users at a time. The bulk user adding has been a long-standing request, so we are glad it’s finally here.
It’s also easier to assign admin or consulting powers. Go to team management and click add new team member to check it out.

Recognition of existing users

When you enter an email to create a user, we check if the user already exists in your system or another portal. If it does, we enter the data for you, so it’s easier to manage user data.

Language in account defaults

When you create users, you can set a language for the new user. Under the company setting, you now have a tap that allows you to set the default language for the portal, which impacts all the users you create, so you start with the correct language and don’t have to change it for each new user.

Inactive users upon creation

When you added a user in the past, the user became active and got an email with account creation. But after setting their account, the portal was empty for them until you started the Sprint. This made an extra unnecessary step for all your people. Now we fixed that, so new users are inactive until a sprint where they participate starts — then they are activated and get an email with account creation.

That also means you can now add inactive users to sprints, and then we activate them when the Sprint starts.

If you want to activate a user before starting a sprint, you can do that under the advanced tab. Admins and consultants are made active on creation.

Read more about how it works here

Email option on modules

As a brand new feature, we added an email option to each module. If you click the new email icon, you can set an email all participants receive upon entering the module. That means you can now send out extra materials or other stuff that’s relevant for each module. This counts as a critical email in the notification level setting.

Just remember — with great powers comes great responsibility. So don’t spam people.

See how to use it

New engagement emails

We added a couple of engagement emails to the new notification system we launched at the start of this month.

• Follow-up on new users. If a user didn’t set up their new account within 3 days, we send a reminder.
• No login to new Sprint. If a user didn’t check out a new Sprint that’s started within 2 days, we send a reminder.

We hope these two new emails will lead to even more engagement from your people and help you kick off new users and sprints better.

Fixes and improvements

• Danish translations fine-tuned multiple places
• Empty optional field on voting module created saving failure — fixed
• Sprint Preview in Sprint Designer overview was broken — fixed
• Inability to add documents to text module in sprint designer — fixed
• Skipping weekends on all engagement emails — added

Notifications revamped

It’s finally here: New notifications. This has been a huge task we have looked forward to for more than a year. We have been aware of the poor quality in the notification emails we have pushed out in the past, and now we have finally pushed it live.

It means emails will have a much lovely look, but more importantly, they will start working better towards creating engagement inside the sprints.

For now, only instant emails are sent. So every time something happens live on the platform you need to know, you’ll be notified. Like a new sprint start, someone tags you or new user creation.

We’ll continue to work and test out to more level: Follow-up emails when the desired action doesn’t occur. Like no login of new users or a new sprint that you haven’t engaged in. Lastly, we are building a series of engagement emails, like when your team is ahead of you, or you have unrated ideas.

What emails you’ll get are in the hands of each user with the new notification level settings.

The new infrastructure also allows us to start working on integrations for notifications in the future, putting it into slack/teams and other things.

New helpdesk

We launched our new helpdesk at acadal.com/help, which contains both help articles, video tutorials, and this changelog. We will add more and more articles and tutorials in the coming months as we speak to you, the customer, about what you need help to do with the platform.

In-app help

As a new thing, you can also access our help articles directly from the app by clicking the new icon at the bottom. Just click it and search for any help you need — or write to us through the app.

Notification infrastructure

The new notification infrastructure is done, and we’ll be ready to launch it in a couple of weeks when we have added the new layer of emails for the levels. This one of the more significant additions to Acadal we made in recent time. We think it’s going to give everyone a much smoothers experience in driving sprints forward.

Fixes and improvements

• The title is now clickable on a sprint in sprint dashboard
• Ability to add text to video modules
• Fixed loss of data when re-designing a sprint during sprint configuration.
• “Customer” company role is now “User”.
• It’s now possible to add existing users to another company portal.

Visual improvements

Partner infrastructure

Fixes and improvements

• Title and description not visible for some on the voting module
• Fixed loading of completed sprints when archived
• Now only admins have access to achieved status on the sprint dashboard
• Testing out new HTML emails for notifications
• Added partner boolean for creation of new accounts (Acadal folks only)

Launching today: People and Idea Management on the Sprint Report.

Today we launch a new experience and feature to our change management platform. It’s a revamped version of the Sprint Report that gives leaders data-driven insights to manage change better and faster.

A new view on Change Management Reporting

Before, the sprint report on Acadal wasn’t really a report. It was a summary of ideas you had to rate individually.

Today we are launching a whole new experience that actually will help you manage your change process and your people’s ideas. We have much more in store for this report, but today we launch the two most essential parts: People & Idea Management.

People: Know where to empower

The people tab will allow you to quickly see who is engaged in your sprint and who you need to motivate and understand why. You can see it on the progression chart, but also the three boxes we call “Showstoppers,” “Neutrals,” and “Champions.” This should help you quickly identify who is engaged and who needs help to identify the importance.

Engagement Score

We also created an engagement score that puts a lot of different engagement metrics together to display a single number. Things like activity level over time, number of ideas and comments, ideas rated, and much more. It should tell what kind of engagement you have and thereby the understanding and motivation of solving your challenge.

The number is relative to the average we see on the Acadal platform, which means you can score above 100%, and that allows for internal comparison of sprints. It will help you to figure out how to improve over time and what works in your organization.

Idea Management: A more natural way to navigate ideas

Your people’s ideas are precious. And you have to be able to navigate them easily. And as we often see more than 100+ ideas, this new view will let you navigate is easy.

• Idea Grid
  The grid holds all your ideas and places them on the two values; Effort and Impact. These numbers we have from your team’s rating of the ideas. The size of the dot indicated how the team-reaction is: bigger is better.
• Filter Ideas
  At the top, you can filter the ideas and only see a specific type. Like “Best ideas” or “Worst ideas”. Next to it, you can also change how many you want to be displayed at a time. The idea-list on the right is updated every time you change a filter and stays relative to the ideas on the board.
• Prioritize or Dismiss Ideas
  We build a new way to move ideas to the next stage. Drag’ n’ drop the ideas onto the two areas called “Prioritize” or “Dismiss”. Then they go off the list, and you only have ideas left you still need to process. If you want to see them on the list, you can do that by toggling “Hide processed ideas”.
• See Ideas in Detail
  Click on any idea on the idea-list to see the full idea detail, including comments.
• Incorporated rating
  The idea rating we released yearly in 2020 is also making a real impact now and is the baseline of how ideas are sorted.

We are genuinely pushing the agenda of making change management people-led by sorting ideas by broad team-rating and not individually thinking.

Design Update

Only one field to create both comments and ideas

Turn comments into ideas

Easy to identify unrated ideas

Anonymous comments

Fixes and improvements

• File upload is improved, and all file format uploads from the same place. You also get a visual indication of the file type in the feed.
• Images have gotten more space in the feed and a beautiful large view if clicked. 
• You can now comment on an idea as well as a comment.
• Rating of ideas has been improved
• You can now make links in the feed as well. Just type the link, and it will register as a link.
• Edit comment has gotten a new look
• Timestamps of comments have been improved and are also showing timestamps on edits now.
• Deleting of comments has been added
• All ideas have titles now for easier navigation on the new Sprint Report.