Problem:
Douglas College needed to find a sustainable way to manage IT demand. Like many IT departments, CEIT struggles with the challenge of demand exceeding supply. Historically, projects were approved based on our financial capacity without enough consideration of the IT resource capacity to carry out the work. The resulting “project debt”, where projects carried over from year to year, accumulated faster than we can pay off. Carrying this project debt resulted in many negative impacts including; deferral of important maintenance, security and operational work, and ongoing project delays. There is a human cost as well, as project debt negatively impacts IT morale, client relationships, credibility and reputation. A way to streamline the project pipeline, reduce gaps and increase transparency was needed.

Methods:
CEIT and Institutional Effectiveness introduced an innovative way for the college to evaluate and approve projects, incorporating balance between financial and resource capacity. Our process features a method to determine IT project capacity that takes into consideration operational versus project resource availability, and an agile way to provide labour estimates for project requests. The new process captures subjective input from stakeholders and considers constraints such as budget, capacity and comparative scoring. We have harnessed the power of math using Microsoft Excel Solver to calculate the constraints and produce a list of projects that maximizes the value of projects within the limits of time and money. The resulting list represents a balance of projects that will contribute to the advancement of the College and reduce year over year project debt.

Result and Conclusion:

• Successful, feedback very positive

• Transparent, fair, build a culture where capacity considered.

• This process enabled a large committee of stakeholders to review, evaluate many projects and make recommendations considering constraints = sustainable process

Speakers