Picking the right Change – Demand Management, Prioritisation and PMO

We’re faced with hundreds of choices every day. A quick online shopping trip faces us with a plethora of options to pick from. Retailers try to help us make the right selection with attractive descriptions and pictures, customer reviews, comparisons, star ratings and the ability to sort by a range of factors depending on what matters to us. The retailer knows that consumers need to compare options to decide on the right product for them.  As a leader of change, selecting the right portfolio of change is possibly the most important decision you must make. Your PMO should be helping you make the key decisions needed to prioritise the right change for your organisation. 

We know that resources are always limited. Of course, different businesses have different constraints, but every resource is finite. You will only have a limited pool of funding to call on, resources to deploy to the change and time to make the greatest impact for the business. It’s normal for the demand for changes and improvements to exceed the resources available. The demand must be carefully managed. We also know that the expectations on change teams to deliver business value grow and grow. Picking the right Change is a critical step in delivering the best value possible for your organisation through change. 

All change is important, why pick? 

Picking the best changes to deliver can be a challenging task for any organisation. There will be many factors to consider, strongly held opinions to contend with and often calls to ‘just do it all’. Selecting the right portfolio of change will allow you to deliver the greatest impact for the business’s investment of funds, resources and time. Taking time to step back to assess the value of potential changes helps avoid missing more valuable opportunities where resource is already committed to delivering an initiative, or change being progressed based on who was shouting loudest.  

Managing the different demands for change isn’t about saying no or limiting what the change team will do. It is about understanding how the change team can deliver the greatest impact and prioritising those initiatives. Some demands may not make the cut for delivery, but through demand management you’ll be able to identify those initiatives and show the reasoning to stakeholders.  

Your PMO are well placed to support you managing incoming demand and helping you to select the right changes for your portfolio. As a team which operates across programmes and projects and endures beyond the completion of any single delivery, Portfolio PMO are in place before any other resource is mobilised for a change. This means Portfolio PMO are ready to help you assess change demand before any resource is deployed, and as delivery controls experts they will be able to own and deliver your Demand Management process. 

The Demand Management Process 

To effectively manage demand your PMO will need to establish and operate a Demand Management Process including: 

Capturing New Demand 

Great ideas for change can come from across the business. Often opportunities are lost where teams don’t know where to take these ideas for change. With the right Demand Capture process in place you will have a clear mechanism for ideas to be shared, documented and enter the Demand Management funnel.  

When capturing new demand you must balance gathering good ideas with the number of new demands received. The Demand Capture process shouldn’t be a hopper for every challenge or problem within the business, but rather a mechanism for real business benefitting transformation opportunities to be received. When establishing the process you may wish to consider who can submit new demand – maybe only team leaders, or the level of information required to raise a new demand request. It’s a good idea to make the route you use to capture demand widely known. We’ve certainly heard of teams not knowing where to go with their project ideas, so going it alone – hiring resource and setting up an independent silo of delivery with no governance or oversight. You certainly don’t want to end up in that situation. 

Triage the Demand 

Your change portfolio isn’t stationary. Demand management isn’t a ‘once and done’ activity, but an ongoing process of assessment. On a regular basis your PMO should be reviewing new change demands and assessing if there is sufficient information and idea development for the change to be considered. If not the PMO should work with the requestor to help them further shape and mature the ask so it can be properly assessed. When the demand is ready the change needs to be assessed. 

Demand Assessment 

Selecting the right changes for your portfolio requires you to understand what matters most to your organisation. By identifying and considering the impact of various key dimensions you will be able to objectively assess each change and identify the most advantageous to progress. 

To make your assessment of the potential change initiatives effective you will need to create a clear basis of assessing and scoring various criteria. It’s a good idea to agree the criteria you’ll look at, and how each criteria will be scored with leadership and key stakeholders before any demand has been assessed. This way you and your PMO can establish an objective set of measures without the emotion attached to anyone’s pet-project. 

To effectively assess the potential changes you will need to balance the completeness of the factors assessed and the complexity of completing the assessment. Too detailed and complex, stakeholders won’t understand the justification of prioritisation. Too simplistic and important, drivers will be missed. When deciding the criteria to consider in your prioritisation you’re broadly trying to answer two questions; 

• How much good does the change bring? and  
• How hard is it to achieve? 

How much good considers the value of the change to the business. Understanding and assessing this is an important first step in both selling the idea of the change to the business and understanding the business/benefits case for the change. You may want to consider aspects such as: 

• Strategic Alignment – The level of impact or enablement the change will bring to the defined business strategy and vision 
• Change in productivity or operating costs – The business may be able to meet customer demands more efficiently or at a lower cost 
• Resilience or Compliance – Protecting the business from risks and issues such as an IT outage, or the impact on your regulatory compliance 
• Revenue or Profitability – The change may enable direct financial benefits for the organisation 
• Environmental or Sustainability – Your organisation may have specific goals around reducing the impact of your operations. 

To gain an understanding if the change is worth doing you must also consider how hard it will be to achieve. In this space it is worth considering: 

• Resource Capacity & Capability – Does the organisation have the level of resource capacity and do they have the risk skills to deliver the change?  
• Cost – Does the organisation have the funding available to deliver the change? It’s important to consider both – can this change be funded, plus what else those funds could be used for 
• Time – Is the organisation able to implement the change in an acceptable timeframe to gain value? 
• Experience – Has the organisation delivered a change like this before, or do you have a partner who has? You may be pushing the bounds of technology, or implementing something which has been done time and time again 
• Risk – What might go wrong, and if it does, how serious will it be? Completely transforming a critical part of your operation or making a ‘big-bet’ level investment will represent a higher risk change programme. 

We find that scoring each potential change on a simple, say 1-5 basis, using agreed descriptions of each level for each criteria will allow you to compare the different demands for change. Scoring shouldn’t be done in isolation by change management teams, but as a collaboration between the business, change management and other key stakeholders, enabled and facilitated by PMO. 

You should also keep in mind that during this initial assessment there will be significant unknowns about each initiative. Some ambiguity is fine, and assumptions should be captured for future validation, but for others the change may require additional shaping. The assessment of each demand shouldn’t be set-in-stone. Factors will change and what was once a highly desirable initiative may become less attractive if say likely costs go up or the businesses strategy moves in a different direction. A potential change which was  scoring poorly because of implementation costs could become much more desirable with a vendor releasing a new product which could meet your needs or a change in regulation could make a change a ‘must do’ for the business. 

In your organisation each of the criteria will not be equally important. You may have a strategic focus on reducing operating costs, or a particularly low appetite for risk. Your assessment will need to weight what matters to your organisation more significantly than criteria which matter less. By deciding which criteria matters the most and weighting them based on that importance will make your assessment as representative as possible of the desirability and difficulty associated for each change. 

Prioritising the Change Portfolio 

Not all change is equally valuable. What may seem like an incredibly attractive and high value transformation may actually be poorer business value due to high cost or difficulty to deliver than a number of smaller, easier incremental changes. By ranking and prioritising the change portfolio using the assessment scoring you will be able to show the most advantageous change as the highest priority for your organisation. 

We must remember that if all change is treated as equal priority, there is no priority. Teams will not know which initiatives to progress as critical and which can be paused, they won’t know where effort needs to be moved to and where timelines must be protected the most. 

With a prioritised portfolio of change you will be able to focus the teams’ efforts and funding on the right initiatives and look beyond the current change initiatives to a considered pipeline of transformation work.  

Prioritisation of the Change Portfolio can be as much an art as a science. Scoring and assessment will get you so far, but business acumen and change management experience will also play a role. With a transparent assessment and prioritisation process you’ll be able to have the right business discussions, with supporting data to build the right portfolio for your organisation. 

Feedback and Visualise 

The Demand Management process shouldn’t be secretive. The outcome of assessment and prioritisation of demand shouldn’t be a surprise to the requestor – ideally, they will have been involved in the process – but sharing wider with the team is a great idea. By feeding back the demand decisions which have been taken, the reasons for prioritisation and the changes being progressed you can both create buy-in for the existing portfolio of change and encourage further business benefiting ideas to be raised. Visualising and sharing the prioritised portfolio of change initiatives will help keep teams engaged, aligned, and show where in the workstack their particular needs may be. 

Once your Demand Management process is established and is being operated by a great PMO you will be confident you’ve picked the right changes and will deliver maximum value for your business.