Part 1: Improve your work intake process
Could your work intake or demand management processes be improved? The Savvy PMO is here to help! This blog series is for those who are overwhelmed with work requests, need a more efficient process, need better scoring and prioritization, have other issues with demand management, or are overwhelmed with work.
Your organization can easily collect and evaluate work requests using a formalized process of demand management.
Your team of experts can objectively evaluate all incoming work to determine if it is aligned with strategy, risk mitigation and customer impact. This will allow you to choose the best initiatives that align with your business goals and strategies, and continue to deliver value.
This blog series will discuss four ways to improve your demand management. This post covers guidelines 1 and 2.
1. Capture initial work requests
The Savvy PMO understands that employees are a great source for ideas but they need an easy way of submitting them. It’s important to create a platform for ideas and requests that doesn’t overwhelm the organization. Here are some tips to help you start small, and then, after you have achieved some success, increase adoption over time.
Get the right information at the beginning. Create a work intake form that is suitable for both approvers and requesters. To streamline and simplify the process, collaborate with your team members to identify required fields and information.
You can design different request forms according to your needs. The intake form and approval process should be tailored to the work requested, the department or the requesters.
Intake flow for work in flight: This will allow you to manage change requests and update your work.
Start the process: Capture work ideas and requests from your teams.
2. Direct the Work Intake Process
Your work intake process must be consistent, clear, visible, and easily understood by everyone in the organization. A strong process will allow you to quickly eliminate unnecessary work requests, defer or put low-value work on hold, as well as accelerate high-value work.
To organize information flow, collection, evaluation, and management, use gates as needed. Match your approval gates to your business decision points. To streamline the process, gather the supporting data and evaluations.
The Savvy PMO has stages like the one shown in the image below. These stages are not required for every type of work. You can customize the stages that your organization has established to suit your work intake process.
These stages, or your customized set, can be mastered easily.
Trust your experts: Let your experts move intake requests along the process workflow as needed. Allow them to assess each request’s merits and ask for additional information.
Automate the project intake process: Automation speeds up this process. You can set up automatic notifications to alert you about events like gate entry or requests that have stalled at the gate. You can also notify your approvers when it is time to take action and send reminders.
Collaborate: Smart PMOs make it easy to communicate, track the process and complete the work. Your experts can use notes and attachments to help them document their decisions, next steps, as well as actions within the workflow. Team members who are well-informed can make corrections, provide missing information, and even be motivated to invent new ways to do the work. Communication can be seamless when you integrate collaborative work management solutions into your central PPM system.
Part 2 of this blog series will cover the last t