The Roadmap Process at SupportAbility
Our aim at SupportAbility is to create efficiencies by enabling providers to prioritise participants and their needs while removing complexity from processes and administration. We help providers gain efficiencies while supporting you to do what they do best: deliver high-quality care and achieve positive outcomes.
We know there is much uncertainty about what the future looks like in and around the disability sector and the NDIS; however, SupportAbility is committed to this sector and will adapt to best meet the evolving needs in this space.
This article provides an overview of the development roadmap process at SupportAbility, how decisions are made regarding which product initiatives and features are prioritised, how to access the current development roadmap, and information about product releases.
Audience: All
Summary
The following list summarises the content within this article. Click on the links below to take you to the relevant sections:
- How SupportAbility Roadmap decisions are made
- How do I access the SupportAbility Roadmap?
- Transition from Roadmap to Product Releases
- How are Product Releases communicated?
How SupportAbility Roadmap decisions are made
Our cross-functional Product Team is tasked with selecting & prioritising the product initiatives and features that form the SupportAbility Roadmap.
These decisions are guided by a combination of the following:
- Input from subscribing providers and sales prospects
- Trends and changes in the disability industry
- Compliance considerations
- Information security needs
- Stability and cost of operations of our platforms and infrastructure
- Fit with our company mission and value proposition
Provider Feedback
Providers have valuable input into the initiatives and features that are prioritised in the SupportAbility Roadmap. This input is contributed in a few different ways.
Provider Engagement
Our Customer Success team engages with our subscriber base regularly to understand their evolving needs and the challenges they face, provide support, and assist them in deriving the most possible value from SupportAbility.
Please let us know if you would like to discuss this at any time; we welcome your feedback on this via support. Through these conversations, common ideas and themes around how SupportAbility can provide more value to service providers often arise.
These ideas and themes are registered in our Features Management System, which is the key tool our Product Function uses to manage development initiatives and features.
Product Discovery
Our Product Function engages providers in product discovery discussions, usability testing, and, at times, surveys to better understand underlying problems, new opportunities, and issues with existing functionality.
This process enables us to ask the right people the right questions about upcoming initiatives and features to ensure we truly grasp the issue and, therefore, develop the best solutions.
The SupportAbility Web App also has settings where you, as a provider, can allow us to contact your staff directly with short surveys on occasion related to the initiatives being designed.
Please see the How to participate in Product Discovery article linked below for more information.
Reported Bugs
Critical bugs are addressed as soon as possible once they are reported via email support. However, bugs of much lower severity are considered when prioritising new product initiatives.
Trends and Changes in the Disability Sector
SupportAbility is a member of National Disability Services (NDS), Disability Services Consulting (DSC) and Disability Intermediaries Australia (DIA).
Our team participate in industry events and webinars and follows the news and industry websites in an effort to keep as up-to-date as possible regarding trends and changes in the sector.
This helps us gauge the importance of upcoming changes and hopefully, avoid surprises.
Compliance Requirements
As a world-first initiative, the NDIS is very fluid and rightly so. New approaches to disability services are being explored, feedback is being provided, and continual adjustments are being made in an effort to improve the Scheme.
Even now, long after the full rollout of the NDIS across the entire nation, the Scheme continues to evolve and change at an unprecedented rate. Since the introduction of the NDIS in 2013, SupportAbility's primary focus has been to ensure that our subscribing NDIS service providers are able to comply with these increasingly fluid and complex compliance requirements.
Our focus on helping your organisation be NDIS compliant is one of our differentiators.
In addition to NDIS compliance requirements, SupportAbility also factors in the compliance requirements of Fair Work and other disability service-related agencies.
SupportAbility's Mission Statement
You can find SupportAbility's Mission Statement on our website.
Along with guiding everything we do, it also informs the development of our product.
Information Security
SupportAbility gained certification against the ISO/IEC 27001 international standard for Information Security in December 2022.
Our company-wide approach to data protection ensures the highest standard of security for our customers.
We take information security very seriously, both in terms of security patching and when it comes to requirements for new and existing functionality.
Please see our ISO27001 Information Security Management Compliance and Certification article linked below for more information.
Platform and Infrastructure Improvements
We fully appreciate that SupportAbility is a critical business tool for our subscribing providers.
As a result, we dedicate resources to maintaining and enhancing our software platform and infrastructure to improve SupportAbility's performance, scalability, and maintainability.
How do I access the SupportAbility Roadmap?
Transparency is one of our core values at SupportAbility, and it's important to us that we publish our plans and intentions for the SupportAbility product for the coming year.
The SupportAbility Roadmap article in our Knowledge Base contains a list of key features and enhancements that are currently being developed (Now), product initiatives that have been prioritised to be developed in the near future (Next), and those that are being considered on the distant horizon (Later).
Compliance obligations and business needs for service providers are constantly changing. The SupportAbility Product Function is tasked with adjusting the product roadmap as required to meet these shifting market demands.
We update the SupportAbility Roadmap article regularly to inform subscribers of these changes, and we recommend that our providers check it from time to time to stay up-to-date.
Transition from Roadmap to Product Releases
Our Product Function and Engineering Team translate product initiatives into features that are included in updated versions of the SupportAbility Web App and Mobile App, i.e. product releases.
Bigger initiatives are intentionally split into smaller features so that these can be released once ready more frequently.
This gives providers access to greater product value more quickly and decreases the risk that too much time is spent developing features that may not fully meet your needs.
Following the release of new features and enhancements, we listen for feedback, collate and review this, and monitor usage to continue to improve the functionality over time, often even after we have started to work on the next initiative.
How frequently are updates to SupportAbility released?
In 2024, we have made a concerted effort to ensure that SupportAbility product releases occur more frequently.
On average, an upgrade to a new version of the SupportAbility Web App and/or Mobile App occurs every four to eight weeks.
How are Product Releases communicated?
Our Product Release upgrades are applied after hours and will not affect users even if they are using SupportAbility at the time.
Whenever a new version of SupportAbility is released, we inform our announcements list, including the nominated Authorised Customer Representatives for each provider, of all the changes that have been made in this version via Release Notes. Release Notes also link to new or updated documentation to assist providers in taking advantage of new features and enhancements.
The Release Notes are published on our website and sent to our announcements list on the evening of the release. For major upgrades, we communicate the changes that are expected, often multiple times, to providers via our announcements list in advance to help providers plan and prepare.
If you would like to subscribe to our announcements, please select the 'Get Notified of New Releases' button on the Release Notes page of the SupportAbility website and fill in your details.
Release Notes page on the SupportAbility Website
A complete list of all of the features, enhancements and updates included in every SupportAbility release can be viewed on the Release Notes page of our website.
This web page can also be accessed by selecting the version number in the top left-hand corner of SupportAbility e.g:
