The integration with JD Edwards, which occupied IT’s efforts for almost a year, was winding down. As PeopleSoft IT prepared to “open for business”, it faced a pressing issue:
How best to service the pent up demand for IT work?
The assignment given David Blumhorst, the Sr. Director of the IT-PMO, was to create a quarterly project planning process with the following parameters:
- Expect over 100 project requests from all business lines
- There are over 50 projects currently under way
- JDE integration is winding down
- Complete the first planning cycle in 4 months!
To accomplish this feat, we decided on 4 high-level steps:
- Create a project prioritization process to force-rank incoming requests
- Create an efficient estimating process to understand the scope and scale of incoming requests
- Gain an understanding of current capacity, how it is utilized, and when it is available
- Create a decision-making process to match the project requests to available capacity
This was an enormously successful effort:
- Successfully slotted 30% more project work without overloading any one track or department.
- Protected IT from mandated staff cuts. Use of new utilization reports succeeded in decreasing the required cuts by 50%.
- Improved employee morale as staff realized they would no longer be arbitrarily overloaded.
