This is part 3 in my 3 part series on Demand Management. In this post, we’ll look at demand management roles and their responsibilities.
Demand Management Roles & Responsibilities
The key roles in this process are:
- Requestor
- Demand Manager
- Demand Analyst
- IT & Business Review Team
- Decision Making Body (ex Steering Committee)
Requestor
The person who submits the idea. This can be the person who came up with the idea or a person designated to submit requests. The requestor:
- participates in the demand management phases to elaborate on the idea submitted
- presents the item to the steering committee
- is accountable for answering questions on purpose, need and priority
Identifying who can submit a request is an important decision when defining this role. Some of the questions to determine this are:
- Can anyone in the organization submit an item or just certain kinds of items?
- Do these items need to be vetted or approved before the requestor can submit them?
- What is the requestor accountable for in each phase of demand management?
Demand Manager
This role is accountable for the demand management process and its outcomes. The Demand Manager ensures items move through the phases. This involves:
- communicating and updating the process
- owning and configuring the tools or templates to support the process
- ensuring that the process runs smoothly
- providing metrics to the organization about the process
- performing governance to ensure that the process is being managed effectively
- reporting on benefits of managing its demand
- identifying hand-shakes between demand management and the software development lifecycle and project management processes in the IT organization
Demand Analysts
This role is accountable for ensuring that ideas go through the appropriate demand funnel activities. The analyst is accountable for much of the day-to-day work that occurs with the demand management process.
The Demand Analyst may also:
- facilitate the demand management meetings and events
- work with the requestors to prepare the deliverables needed as the idea works through its lifecycle
- produce the metrics and updates to show the demand management effectiveness
- capture the dispositions of the demand items and ensure they move into their next phase based on those outcomes
IT & Business Review Team
This is a group made up of representatives from across IT that will participate in the review, discover and estimation of items coming through the process.
This group should be made up of architects, tech leads and analysts and other “big picture” type roles that can focus on areas like:
- if the organization has the right tools, skills or capabilities to solve the problem
- how best to solve the problem using existing or new technologies
- identifying the hidden or unknown impacts or risks that solving the problem may expose
- providing ROM (rough order of magnitude) estimates based on high level information
Decision Making Body
This is a decision-making body made up of business and IT representatives that will make several different decisions in the demand management process:
- is this idea worth exploring? and
- is the proposal worth pursuing?
The roles described in this post are key to managing items coming through the demand funnel. Your organization may need other roles depending upon size of the organization, compliance or regulatory factors which impact your demand or any other criteria which makes your demand unique.
A simple approach to demand management can solve many problems. This series was intended to give you some background in how to do that.
Have more questions? Reach out to me at The Virtual BA Coach.