Over the past few years, the Project Office has mainly focused on project management and the successful delivery of key University and IT projects. However, the team has now developed its role of working with teams across the service to facilitate resource planning and demand management across the whole portfolio of IT Services projects.
During the last year, the Project team has been working with colleagues across IT Services to implement CA’s ‘Clarity’ platform. After a huge effort from many resource managers and the central team, Clarity is now fully populated with all of our current resource commitments – for projects (over 80 currently), service support and BAU activities. We can now have much higher confidence in the resource provisioning into projects to increase our performance for on-time project delivery. We also have visibility of pinch points for individual resources, and over the coming months, areas of over commitment will be reviewed and action taken to reduce / eliminate planned staff overload.
With this clear base of resource planning, we can then have a more effective conversation with business customers regarding possible new projects and their likely timescales. Alongside this, our project processes have been updated in order to help address any upcoming project, release and demand management challenges and to enhance our annual planning. These new processes have been launched already within IT Services, and will be launched more widely in the coming months.
“Delivering projects within a fast paced environment creates many challenges. However, the work the Project Office has been doing, aims to facilitate predictable project delivery while enhancing the customer experience, even under the pressure tight deadlines.” Liz Simcox, Head of Project Office