The Roadmap Process at SupportAbility
This article provides an overview of the roadmap process for SupportAbility, how roadmap decisions are made, how to access the current development roadmap as well as some information about release management.
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?
- How are Roadmap items communicated upon release?
How SupportAbility Roadmap decisions are made
The SupportAbility Product Team is an internal team tasked with selecting, designing and prioritising the list of new features and enhancements that form the roadmap for the SupportAbility product.
These roadmap decisions are guided by the following considerations: NDIS compliance requirements, provider input, platform and infrastructure improvements as outlined below.
NDIS 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.
Provider Input
Providers have valuable input into the direction and development items that are prioritised in the SupportAbility Roadmap. This input is contributed in a few different ways.
Provider Engagement
Our Customer Success team engage with our subscriber base regularly, to understand their evolving needs and the challenges they face to provide support and assist them to derive the most possible value from their SupportAbility subscription.
Through these conversations, common ideas and themes around how SupportAbility can provide more value to service providers. These ideas and themes are then communicated to the SupportAbility Product Team for consideration.
Roadmap Surveys
Periodically, SupportAbility sends out surveys to subscribing providers to understand the value and priority they would prescribe to a range of features the SupportAbility Product Team is considering to ensure that our engineering resources are deployed in a manner that benefits as many providers as much as possible.
Bugs
When providers register bugs via email support, the details of the bugs and their severity and impact are communicated to the SupportAbility Product Team for consideration.
Platform and Infrastructure Improvements
We fully appreciate that SupportAbility is a critical business tool for our subscribing providers. As a result, we take time to maintain and enhance our software platform and infrastructure to improve the performance, scalability, security and maintainability of SupportAbility.
How do I access the SupportAbility Roadmap?
Transparency is one of our core values here 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 the SupportAbility Product Team have prioritised and scheduled to deliver within the next 12 months.
The NDIS compliance obligations and business needs for service providers are constantly changing. The SupportAbility Product Team is tasked with adjusting the product roadmap as required to meet these shifting market demands. We update the SupportAbility Roadmap article on a regular basis to keep subscribers informed of these changes and we recommend that our providers check this article from time to time to stay up-to-date regarding any changes.
How are Roadmap items communicated upon release?
We are continually improving the SupportAbility product to respond to changes to the NDIS and meet the needs of our diverse subscriber base. SupportAbility's Engineering Team follow the agile methodology, so we are releasing new versions of SupportAbility generally every 3-4 weeks.
Release Notifications
The great majority of upgrades are applied after hours and will not affect users even if they are using SupportAbility at the time. These minor upgrades and the changes within them are announced at the time of release. For major upgrades, we communicate, often multiple times, in advance, to help providers plan and prepare.
Whenever a new version of SupportAbility is released, we inform the nominated SupportAbility Authorised Representatives for each subscriber of all the changes we've made via our Release Notes. These Release Notes also link to new or updated documentation to assist providers in taking advantage of new features and enhancements.
Release Notes Web Page
A complete list of all SupportAbility releases and all the improvements contained in each release can also be viewed on the Release Notes page of our website.
This release notes page can also be accessed by selecting the version number in the top left-hand corner of SupportAbility e.g:
