Demand Management for a Franchisee IT Support Organization

The Challenge

Several  years ago, during a meeting with engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), one of the engineers, an over 20-year DEC veteran, made a statement that I’ll never forget. He said that no system he had ever worked on was deployed into production and actually used by real users. He may not have had much control over this, but the IT leadership in his organization certainly did.

An important topic not often talked about in the project management community is how to deliver solutions your customers actually want; this area receives little attention for two reasons:

1. First, typically, there is a greater demand for systems or  products than the IT team is able to deliver; therefore, any system or product the IT group is working on is assumed to be important.
2. Second, demand generation and demand management are typically handled outside the project team—often in marketing—and therefore project managers are often not directly involved.

It has been well-documented that the majority of system or product features delivered are not actually used. Even when a system is successfully developed and launched, many of the features are never used. No wonder so many businesses feel like their IT teams and budgets are too large! So, demand management is a very important topic.

Project …