IT Demand Management using edison365
Are you also struggling with gathering IT Demand across the entire organization? Do the business units even know where and how to submit IT Demand? And, if you have the complete overview, are you able to prioritize and dispatch the work to the appropriate IT service delivery teams? All these questions emphasize the need for a good IT Demand Management process. In this blog I will briefly explain what the IT Demand Management process is, and how edison365 can support this.
IT Demand Process
Demand management is a key element of companywide IT governance which helps to better align business objectives with IT priorities. In combination with visibility, fact-based decisions and control over IT investments it will help to maximize business value delivered by IT.
The IT Demand Management process distinguishes the following three basic steps:
Capturing IT Demand
In order to capture IT Demand, a standardized and accessible way of working should be deployed throughout the entire organization. Software such as edison365ideas for IT Demand Management can help with this. Edison365ideas, build on the Office365 platform, supports the IT Demand Management process in a powerful and intuitive way.
It allows you to setup business solutions and let the business create IT requests against them. This allows you to group, combine and triage all IT Demand related to a business solution. By providing access to all employees in the organization and using an intuitive form to create an IT Request, the threshold for capturing IT Demand is very low.
By searching for similar requests during the capturing process edison365ideas prevents the creation of duplicate items. Next to this, it will support and increase the discussion on existing ones and it will help getting all the requirements. This off course will improve the quality of the IT Request and the way it’s supported by the business.
Another important capability of edison365ideas is voting. By allowing employees to vote on IT Requests you will get a better insight of what’s really going on in the business with regards to IT.
Scoring IT Demand
Once IT Demand has been captured and all required information is available it needs to be reviewed and scored individually. Scoring can be done by one or more reviewers or review groups. The scoring should be fact-based on KPI’s which include at least Contribution to Strategy, Time to Deliver, Achievability and Cost.
Edison365ideas for IT Demand comes with a predefined set of KPI’s, but also allows you to determine your own KPI’s and scoring mechanism. Putting an IT request under review and assigning the review can easily be done by dragging and dropping via a Kanban board.
Prioritize Demand
When all reviewers have scored the individual requests it’s time to prioritize and triage the demand. Based on the weighted average score of all reviewers, edison365ideas enables you objectively determine which it requests should be awarded. Next to objectively awarding demand, you are always able to subjectively award individual requests as well based on gut feeling or due its mandatory nature.
Promoting Demand
The last step in the IT Demand Management Process is to promote the awarded demand into either a change request or project (request). Each individual demand item can off course lead to an individual change request or project, but it is also possible to combine demand items.
If the demand is promoted to a change request it can be picked up by your delivery teams which work with tools such as Microsoft Azure Boards or Jira. If the demand is promoted to a project (request) it can be followed in other applications within the edison365 suite or in other PPM solutions such as ServiceNow.
Integration with the edison365 suite (Business Case and/or Project) is off course native, integration with third party software can be achieved by using Microsoft Flow.
edison365
edison365 is the end to end business transformation platform built for Office 365. Combining award winning ideas, business case and project management modules, edison365 allows for the seamless generation, justification and execution of projects that drive strategic success.
