Over the last few months, the Project Office team has been working with all areas of IT Services to embed Demand Management – looking at the resource required to deliver:
- Business as usual (BAU)
- Known projects
- Predicting the resource required for future projects
All projects are now going through the new project processes, giving a much clearer picture of the demand coming in and our capacity to fulfill it. This information is used in the evaluation of whether a project can go ahead, its impact on other projects, or if additional external resource required.
Improving estimations
The next step in our demand journey is to improve our estimations in order to work towards the promotion of a healthy work-life balance, alongside more predictable project delivery. This will bring multiple benefits:
- Better estimation of duration of projects – based on actual hours spent on previous similar projects
- Better understanding of which teams need to be involved in a particular type of project and at what points – beneficial for teams with a small amount of input into multiple projects
- Better estimation of project demand – even when little is known about the project or upcoming initiative
- More accurate estimation of the BAU effect across the academic year – so this is taken into account when looking at capacity for project work
- Visibility of teams who consistently have higher demand than capacity
- Visibility of over-allocations – so that this can be reviewed and addressed
- Better feedback and early warning of whether a project is on schedule or not
How will we achieve this?
To enable this improved estimation, we will be rolling out the use of Clarity for all staff to record actual time against the different projects and categories of work.
This has been piloted within the Project Office over the last couple of months – it has worked well and is quick to complete on a weekly basis. The data recorded will be used in reports in Tableau that will:
- Categorise projects into different types – for example ‘Purchase and implementation of a cloud solution’ – so that we can use this data to plan future similar projects
- Split projects into reusable stages – for example ‘Procurement’ – so we can better estimate the length of that stage and the number of teams involved, for future projects
- Report the patterns of time spent against BAU over the academic year – enabling a more accurate forecast for the following year
- Be used to create and refine Project Templates
What’s next?
The pilot will be extended to at least one team in each of Application Services, Core Infrastructure, and End User Services over the next two months, to uncover any intricacies in the different types of teams.
There will then be a short period of time to consolidate the outputs and set up reports outlined above in Tableau, before this is rolled out to all other teams over the following three months.
If you have any queries, please contact Liz Simcox – Head of Project Office.
Author: Liz Simcox