The IS PPMO team within IS Business & Consulting Services is evolving our project intake process to be more streamlined and adaptive to different types of project requests. The main goals of this effort are to incorporate IS and stakeholder feedback that our process could be faster, more accurate, and reduce redundancy for everyone involved—all while making the intake process shorter.
We’re making improvements in the following areas, highlighting some of them below.
- Reducing multiple discovery meetings
- Moving from comprehensive to limited technical feasibility
- Leveraging standardized resource estimates
- Streamlining cost estimation with improved accuracy
- Allowing intake to start before funding is identified
- Moving to streamlined governance at the end of the process
Reducing multiple discovery meetings with a “Discovery Form” that collects critical information from the caregiver up-front that save hours of re-work down the road and shortens the overall duration of the intake process due to fewer meetings.
Collecting this information helps the IS intake team get a jump-start on the request by having important information available at the beginning of the process and better informs the correct workflow path. The caregiver will only need to fill out information relevant to their request. This helps the caregiver think through their request and articulate their business needs (i.e. “What problem are we trying to solve?”).
Caregivers will continue to enter requests into ServiceNow and after submitting a request, they will receive an email with the Discovery Form to complete as part of the next step in the process.
More toward focusing on business requirements vs. comprehensive up-front technical feasibility
Today, intake involves a level of comprehensive technical feasibility with significant work to scope the project, define the initial architecture, and design the solution. However, during the implementation process, much of this work is revisited during detailed planning and can result in re-work.
The intake team will now conduct higher-level scope planning to clearly define the business needs and business problem being solved. Rather than doing detailed technical feasibility, a cross-functional review by critical teams involved with the request will support a limited technical feasibility assessment in Intake to identify red flags (e.g. conflict of standards).This will shorten the duration of intake, help transition the request to the implementation team sooner, and reduce re-work.
Another major update to the intake process is simplifying the way the intake project manager creates the resource plan.
The PPMO is shifting from completing detailed resource estimates in intake to now having them completed in implementation during detailed planning. Intake PMs will create a draft resource plan to share with resource managers by having important scope questions answered and using standard estimates developed from historical estimation data and reviewing similar types of past projects.
Taking this approach reduces the overall timeline of intake by reducing meetings, saving resource manager’s time calculating detailed estimates, and saving the intake PM’s time creating the resource plan.
More Information
See the overview of IS project intake improvements underway.
Questions? Please reach out to Megan Campbell, exec. director of PPMO intake/governance.