Practical IT Research that Drives Measurable Results Deal More Effectively with Demand for IT Staff

Introduction Stay informed about requests and staff availability Organizations are faced with ongoing demands for services which cannot be met with available internal IT staff. Joint planning with the organization’s senior management is essential to align IT resources with most pertinent and valuable initiatives. Small requests and unplanned projects compete with major initiatives for staff, and often come in the back door. Successful IT departments must work with the business to determine which initiatives are of most value and resource accordingly. This solution set will help you: – Stabilize long-term staff planning – Stay informed about requests and staff availability – Prioritize requests

The Demand Management Roadmap

Executive Summary What is success? A successful demand management process provides management with high level control over what gets done, and deals with competing requests fairly and transparently. Get management to lead planning. Joint Management-IT planning, driven by the business, not IT, is essential to create a long-term plan that is aligned with staff budgets. The planners should meet monthly to review and revise the plan in light of changing organizational priorities. Handle unplanned requests consistently and transparently. A defined framework for prioritizing unplanned requests helps to reduce the amount of arm-twisting and escalation that is characteristic of informal environments. Don’t allow staff to make priority decisions. Work assignments should be clearly prioritized and the number of concurrent tasks minimized.

Demand management spans several important business processes and remains one of IT’s toughest challenges. Managing Supply Staff Capacity Planning: identifying the staff skills and the number of staff required to address the portfolio plans, and the anticipated change and other requests. Resource Planning: identifying IT resource requirements to drive funding – labor costs compete with capital and external service costs. Staff Allocation: assignment of staff to required activities and tracking their availability. Project Management: ensuring that work on major initiatives proceeds to a successful conclusion. Managing Demand Portfolio Management: planning the overall portfolio of applications and services leads to major projects. Change Management: planning changes to existing applications or services leads to maintenance releases and simple fixes. Request Management: processing all service requests not included in Portfolio or Change Management, approval or rejection as well as managing delivery.

Ineffective management of demand is a key problem, trumping even IT/Business Alignment and Project Prioritization. Of several essential businesses processes on the list of things adversely affecting organizational effectiveness, organizations are least happy with current Demand Management practices. More than 25% of organizations are unsatisfied with current Demand Management practices. Likely causes for this assessment include: Lack of consistency and visibility into prioritization processes. Minimal management direction and involvement in prioritization. Too many requests receiving approval. Inaccurate deadline estimation due to lack of historical data.

Info-Tech sees two types of organizations. Which are you, chaos or order? Ad-HocConsistency Chaotic Description Aligned with business Business rubber-stamp IT proposals Management Involvement in Planning Senior management initiates and prioritizes all initiatives Requests are processed first-in with frequent escalation and pressure to move up the queue Priority- setting for smaller initiatives Rules defined in a priority-matrix allow consistent prioritization of small requests Techs use personal judgement to prioritize a large number of concurrent requests and tasks Empowerment of IT Staff Techs are assigned a limited number of concurrent tasks

Individual priorities are constantly competing head-to-head with organizational goals. IT’s goal to get the right work done in the right order is often aggravated by politics – typically the loudest individual or department gets the highest priority, regardless of what else is on IT’s plate. 90% of our tasks are not prioritized to meet business priorities; they serve the requestors’ personal objectives. IT Director, Manufacturing Political status affects prioritization. Squeaky wheel, perceived pain level, those all weigh into the decisions of who is doing what. CIO, Government ” “ ” “ Business involvement increases alignment to overall organizational goals. Having a balanced framework for prioritization takes accountability off of IT and ensures effective handling of unplanned requests. Info-Tech Insight

Organizations with an IT Steering Committee are half as likely to rate their prioritization process as ineffective than those without. We all want to do more than we can manage and many projects add value. We consistently must make hard choices to not do projects that do not strategically support operations. Management of urgent vs. important will always be a challenge. IT Director, Healthcare ” “ Steering Committees increase the overall effectiveness of the prioritization process

Despite good intentions, staffing is likely to be inadequate to address all requests. As we have increased our longer-term planning, we have done more advance communication with management on our plans, and thus we have increased the number of things that management sees us delivering later than expected. It Director, Manufacturing Unfortunately, the CEO believes that if you brief him on a date that something will be delivered and you miss that date, shame on you. He doesn’t always want to hear that other things got in the way. I don’t know that that’s a failure on the part of this department, but it’s an issue. Senior Programmer, Professional Services “ ” “ ” Demand will always exceed supply. Some requests will undoubtedly be delayed, postponed, or turned down, regardless of planning. Organizations fear transparency because they don’t want to bring problems out into the open. Visibility sheds light on the problems to the business, which makes IT uncomfortable, but this is the first essential step towards finding a solution. Info-Tech Insight

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