The Situation

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

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!

The Plan

To accomplish this feat, we decided on 4 high-level steps:

1. Create a project prioritization process to force-rank incoming requests
2. Create an efficient estimating process to understand the scope and scale of incoming requests
3. Gain an understanding of current capacity, how it is utilized, and when it is available
4. Create a decision-making process to match the project requests to available capacity

The Results

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.