Demand management
Your IT department receives continuous demands for services and solutions. Demands can range from minor enhancements to corporate applications, to major transformational initiatives based on business events, to ideas that take advantage of disruptive technologies and leap your organization ahead of the competition. It is up to the IT department to manage these demands - prioritize and implement them - as well as make and defend prioritization decisions so that the wrong demands don't get attention due to executive pressure or a "squeaky wheel".
At the same time, demands are constantly changing, and some demands are very similar to but not quite exactly like others. Furthermore, demands need to be traced through to execution - with a developed solution often satisfying some but not all of the demand.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is designed for ideas capture and demand management in this complex environment. It enables you to:
- Capture new investment ideas and demands from a large community of stakeholders in a central, repository-based solution with a web interface that everyone in the organization can access
- Manage the continuous stream of ideas, opportunities, and business demands in dashboards - enabling you to identify duplications and conflicts
- Prioritize business needs, ideas, and project proposals in a variety of ways, such as pairwise comparison and strategic ranking, to promote and defend strategic decisions
- Use workflows to support an executive decision and sign-off process for demands
Capture ideas from customers or employees in UNICOM® Focal Point™'s web portal
Delivery management
Once new solutions or systems have been approved, they need to be fielded. This can be a complex on-going task. In most organizations, product teams are globally distributed and are developing products using their own methods and practices. You need to be sure that they are delivering the right product capabilities at the right time with the greatest efficiency. Development teams need to collaborate closely with stakeholders to ensure that they are developing the right thing, and collaborate with each other to share practices and standards. Management needs visibility into what is going on so it can help the technical teams with resources, and manage road maps to operate within financial and resource constraints. Business and product managers need visibility into the delivery pipeline so that they can understand how things are going.
In the meantime, business requirements for what your customers or internal stakeholders want are constantly changing, as are internal factors like development resources. You need to be able to respond to changing portfolio demands by knowing exactly where you are and how you can adjust because that is going to determine how successful you are.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ is designed for delivery management in this complex environment. It enables you to:
- Guide efficiencies and control through collaboration, communication, and transparency about delivery pipeline information
- Create teams that can self-direct themselves using standard processes and governed standards, enabling agility on a wider scale with increased transparency and governance
- Understand value and estimate the cost of tradeoffs so you can manage projects and operate within resource, financial, and time constraints
- Respond quickly to business and project changes to ensure that risk is mitigated early and priorities are adjusted appropriately
- Inform decision-makers at all levels with improved traceability
Roadmap of projects plotted against time over histogram of resources available
Integration with other tools in the DevOps delivery lifecycle
Demand and delivery management with UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to scale the DevOps process, and use methods such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to meet today's complex velocity challenge - going faster, helping teams to deliver changes to the business as quickly as possible, so you can get their feedback and make sure what you're delivering has the most business value. UNICOM® Focal Point™ utilizes Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standards to integrate seamlessly with other tools in the DevOps chain - from requirements, to solution design, to build, test, and deployment.
You can see information in other 'friend' tools across the network - such as requirements, change requests, action items, solution designs, tests, and application components to be deployed - create links to relevant artifacts in those tools, then see and navigate those links at any time. OSLC creates a federated picture of corporate information to help you manage the DevOps processes of release management, testing, and deployment. Focal Point becomes the fulcrum for planning, executing, and delivering solutions.
