"What happens to an RFE after I submit it?"

I bet this is a question that many of you have asked yourselves or others within your organization. Pessimists might think that we just toss them into a folder, never to be read again. It would be much simpler if we did that, but that is not what we do! In this case, the optimists out there (and others in the know) envision a process much closer to reality.

Some of you might even be wondering what an “RFE” is: an RFE is a Request For Enhancement. CPR+ is an amazing application, but it seems there’s always “one more thing” that our customers would like to add to its functionality.  When this happens, we suggest an RFE be submitted.

We receive an average of 20-25 RFE’s every week. If it’s a week we are conducting the quarterly Platinum calls, that number is double or triple. The same goes for the week after the User Conference.

We actually have a review process that we follow for every RFE that is submitted.

First, let me review the many ways in which an RFE may be submitted. Some of you choose to send them in via email, others will request them during a quarterly Platinum call, others will call us and explain what is needed, and then there are some of you that will post your request to the CPR+ Listserv in hopes of getting other users to jump in and gang up on us . All of these steps work, but we would prefer that you send us an email with a detailed description of what you would like changed, how you would envision it working and what benefit it would provide.

By early next year, we plan to have an online RFE submission form to streamline this process.

Who Decides???

There is not just one person that sits in a padded room and reviews all of the RFE’s and decides what goes in and what is rejected. Every Friday afternoon, we have a meeting of the Internal Review Board. This Board consists of Stuart Crane, Ted McGraner, Darren Young, Lisa Kibe, Vincent Thompson (when he’s not on the road) and myself. We read each and every request, determine exactly what is being requested and then decide if it would benefit the majority of you, the customers, or if it is something that will only benefit the customer that is making the request.

If it is a great idea (a “No Brainer” as Jeff would say,) we will make every attempt to spec it out and assign it to a Programmer for a future release. If we feel that it is a good idea but we are not sure that all of you would use it, we may send it to a different list for further discussion. Sometimes we need to send a question back to the submitter, asking for more information. If this happens, please don’t get upset with us! We just want more details to better understand what you are asking for or why. Honestly, there are a few requests that we read and wonder why that would ever be needed; if that is the case we usually just reject it. So, the more details you provide, the better!

When any RFE gets moved from the Internal Review list to another list (RFE’s Rejected, RFE’s Approved, Ready to Spec, or just RFE’s etc…) the D.H.S. employee that submitted the RFE on your behalf will receive an auto-generated “To-Do” from our internal application stating that the RFE was moved. It is that employee’s responsibility to contact you the customer and let you know what was decided. Just so you know, there are many RFE’s that we have approved but have not yet added to the application. Unfortunately, we cannot add all of them right away. Every quarter, we review the Approved list and set the highest priority to those items that will be the most beneficial for greatest amount of customers.

Ted, Lisa, Stuart and Darren in the Internal Review Board.

As you know or should know, any enhancements that are approved will not go into the smaller, “service pack” releases that are available throughout the year. All enhancements are added to the major release in the fall of each year. Yes, there are exceptions when an enhancement is added to a service pack, but those are very rare and usually only done because of a state or federal requirement.

If you would like to see the status of an RFE you have submitted, you can navigate to the Customer-Only page on our website, https://portal.cprplus.com/CustomerOnly. To obtain a User Name and Password, send an email to support@cprplus.com.

The Internal Review Board spends over 250 hours a year just on the initial review of new RFE’s. We do this as part of our mission: “To cultivate passionate Customer loyalty by providing the most powerful, user-friendly, and technologically advanced software combined with the industry’s best Training and Customer Support services.” If you ask for it, we’ll listen!

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