Get Control of Your IT Project Portfolio

Description

Are you having trouble managing your incoming software development work?

• Are bad or poorly developed ideas or features wasting your team's time?

• Do you have more projects than you can finish?

• Do you have lots of emergencies?

• Do you have multiple ways that work is submitted, tracked and managed?

• Do you have trouble determining what the priorities are?

Or, do you know that your IT work in-take processes could be improved but don’t know where to start to fix them?

This course can help you!

This course introduces a simple 4-phase framework that, when introduced, has shown time and time again to not only improve the delivery problems defined above but also improve the quality of the work coming into IT.

Every part of an organization has IT needs. Many IT teams try to deliver everything that comes in at a time when IT departments are straining under the weight of reduced staff and budget. Some IT teams try to solve the problem by adding more people. The problem to solve isn't increasing capacity. It's:

• ad hoc processes for accepting and prioritizing work in-take

• poorly defined work requests

• operational and process work compete for the same resources and time

Simply put, when you have better quality requests coming through your work in-take, delivery becomes repeatable, sustainable and consistently adds value for the organization.

You're probably saying to yourself, "Another process! How does that add value?"

I've had IT leaders tell me that want to stay "agile" so they don't implement processes.  Well, you can't solve the problems identified above by doing the same things that got you to this place.  Come on, even the Agile Manifesto doesn't say no process.

The 4-phase framework gives organizations easy guardrails and gates to get them started.  You can choose how and when to scale as you see improvements in quality and delivery. This course will teach you how to do that too.

You'll hear real life case studies in this course that you may encounter when rolling out this framework so you understand how to solve those problems. And finally you will get a starting point for some KPIs (key performance indicators) and other metrics so you can show your organization how this improving not just delivery but also the quality of the changes you are requesting.

In this course, you will learn…

• What IT Demand Management process, where it falls in the software delivery lifecycle and its purpose

• How ideas become work items and why that lifecycle is important to committing to the work

• The primary roles that support IT Demand Management and their responsibilities

• A simple 4 phase process framework for demand management that will work for every organization

• The high-level activities and key decisions that define each phase of Demand Management and how that impacts work coming through the process

• Different categories of work that come into an organization and how to apply these to your demand management activities

• How to scale the IT Demand Management process for different types of projects that flow through the process

• Hear case studies of common demand management issues and how they were solved

• Understand how Demand Management works with Agile and innovation practices

• Learn some key metrics to start reporting on the benefits of your Demand Management process

By the end of the course, you will . . .

• Create a backlog of the work that has been requested of your IT teams

• Draft your organization’s demand management process

• Identify the roles and responsibilities you'll need to support your Demand Management process

• Know the common challenges that come up in demand management and what steps to take to address them

  
  

You’ll have a set of actionable plans and artifacts to start a Demand Management practice at your organization.

Who this course is for:

• Portfolio managers, Program managers, and Project Managers

• Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts and other roles who are responsible for defining, managing or reporting on work in-take.

• Innovation leaders who are accountable turning ideas into deliverable features

• IT or Business Managers who request technology work.

• IT leaders who are inundated with projects that all seem to have the same priority

• IT managers and supervisors who lead teams that are accountable for the delivery of projects

• And, finally, developers, engineers and tech teams, this course is for you too. This course helps ensure the work coming your way is clear, prioritized, and actually doable, so you can spend less time firefighting and more time building quality solutions.