Rebalance Project Intake for Small Enterprise
Tip the scale of supply and demand in IT’s favor.
- Small IT departments commonly face a project supply-demand imbalance: a limited supply of IT resources to address an ongoing excess of project demands.
- This imbalance not only makes it difficult for IT leaders to prioritize high-value work, but it also contributes to poor project completion rates, over-allocated staff, and dissatisfied stakeholders. The enterprise may be forced to hire a project manager, costing upwards of $145,000, and effectively eating up IT’s budget.
- Unless the business is willing to adequately resource IT to keep up with demands, it’s up to small IT leaders to find a solution that makes workloads more manageable and enables IT to focus on the most valuable initiatives.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- A simple yet disciplined approach to intake discipline represents the best opportunity for small IT leaders to reconcile the imbalance between supply and demand in order to ease IT workloads and improve project success rates.
- Intake discipline doesn’t require a high degree of project portfolio management (PPM) rigor or formal approval from senior executives. You can start alleviating supply-demand pain points right away by introducing small increments of change to your workflow. You can introduce more layers of change and rigor as your capabilities evolve and workloads become more balanced.
Impact and Result
- Streamline the intake workflow into a single funnel to protect your team against over-allocation and enable better portfolio oversight into work in progress.
- Improve stakeholder relations by setting realistic expectations for the lifecycle of each request and providing increased transparency into IT’s processes.
- Understand available resource capacity of IT staff in order to drive the throughput of the highest value requests.
- Reduce project waste from 10% to 5%, saving up to $44,000.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 3 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Create a standardized intake process
- Call 1: Scoping call
- Call 2: Identify standardized intake workflow
Guided Implementation 2: Develop intake capabilities
- Call 1: Review and refine intake processes