Are you finding that every team is asking for different things at once and you don’t know how to manage all of the demand? Not enough capacity to deliver everything? Are initiatives being started with poor definition and no plan?
Demand management is a process your organisation can use to manage, prioritise, and schedule internal change projects all in service of your business strategy and purpose.
Effective demand management ensures projects align with the business’s strategy. It helps to create a clear view of the pipeline, manages resources, enables accountable decision making and, ensures collaboration across the entire business.
In practice, demand management is a process that enables the delivery side of the organisation. Demand management aims to create a shared understanding of demand and supply. By fostering cross-organisation collaboration, it removes siloes and lays down a formal process for projects. Ultimately, when everyone works together, the organisation is more likely to deliver great outcomes.
The standard approach to demand management is to create a place for stakeholders across the organisation to raise their change initiatives. These initiatives are triaged and assessed to identify the right next steps and teams to involve. The initiative is then defined further before passing to the relevant delivery teams. This process should be adapted to your organisation’s needs, challenges and structures but there are nine aspects that we believe can help any organisation improve their demand management and help you excel in internal and external delivery:
A clear, end-to-end demand and delivery process creates common language, common understanding, and steps that everyone can follow. This is important because it helps people understand how to engage with the process and what their role is within it. This process should be intertwined with your approach to reporting, prioritisation, scheduling and strategy reviews so that everyone in your organisation has a clear understanding of how much is being achieved and how much can be achieved.
Business partnering means creating a two-way conversation between the team delivering change and the team asking for change. This doesn’t necessarily require a dedicated “Business Partner” role within your organisation. Building a culture of communication and collaboration between your Business teams and Delivery teams can be the first step in business partnering. When we communicate and remove siloes, everyone in the business understands the direction of travel and the initiative is more likely to achieve its aim. This is more than just discussion though, business partnering also includes collaborating when defining the initiative to ensure that the delivery teams truly understand the requirements and customers understand the capabilities of the organisation.
It’s important that everyone understands who owns certain aspects of a project and who is accountable for decisions. It should be really clear how and when people should be involved in a change project so that people don’t hold up the process by being more challenging than they need to be. This means initiatives can progress and are less likely to get lost in handovers between teams.
Creating a single funnel of demand allows us to manage what is coming in and where it’s going. This prevents a project from leapfrogging the funnel. It makes things easier to manage and reduces the time your team will spend doing side-of-desk work. It also means things are prioritised, capacity is protected and no work is taken on that may be counter to your organisation’s strategy.
This is about embedding flexibility into the process. You don’t want every project going through one single funnel because small things will get stuck while larger projects will require more diligence and governance. Therefore, create flexibility by having standard alternate paths, but be careful this doesn’t allow projects to jump out of one process and into another because things will get missed and people will always want to take the quickest route.
Before your business is committed to an initiative, you need to spend time understanding what is being asked, what’s in and out of scope, what the deliverables are, the impacts, and who should be involved. This should be led by the business teams and supported by the delivery teams through your business partnering model. Creating an early understanding of scope and impacts will lead to a smoother delivery and there won’t be any unforeseen problems or blockers. By spending more time upfront, you won’t lose months further down the line working on an unexpected and avoidable issue.
A key part of demand management is having the ability to delay or decline initiatives. The decision points and accountability to make those decisions are key. It requires the right level of influence and varying perspectives from the business and delivery teams to come to the correct decision. To make justifiable decisions against the organisation’s strategy and capacity, a prioritisation mechanism should be integrated into your demand management process and governance. Every prioritisation mechanism is different and tailored to your company, but each one should generally consider the cost, impact and effort of an initiative before proceeding to delivery.
People need to check where a project is at all times and understand why a decision has been made. This requires clear communication governance and accountability of decisions. Creating transparent decision logs, recording meeting notes, and having reports from delivery teams enables tracking of all initiatives in your portfolio.
It’s crucial that the demand management process isn’t just understood and followed by one team. It should be shared with all relevant stakeholders because it sets clear expectations, creates more collaboration, and embeds all the previous steps. Information on the process should also be readily available to everyone in the organisation to improve understanding of the engagement and involvement required from everyone involved.
Demand management working at its best, enables schedules to be optimised. It encourages collaboration which has far-reaching benefits across the entire organisation, whilst also reducing potential bottlenecks, and shaping operations.
If you need help managing demand in your organisation or enabling successful people and change management, please contact us.