Situation:
The new CIO at a multi-billion dollar, global banking institution realized that the organization’s existing governance structure and processes were not adequately supporting the business’s growing demand for IT services. Additionally, he wanted to address the fact that business requests outpaced the IT department’s capacity to deliver. His desire was to instill greater discipline through a demand management process, and he asked Metis Strategy to lead the effort to create such a process.
Approach:
The Metis Strategy team worked with the IT leadership as well as with the Presidents and business leaders from each of the four divisions of the company, to devise and implement a six-step demand management and prioritization process. The Metis Strategy team convened smaller and larger group sessions, getting all stakeholders’ perspectives on their IT needs, how they were generated, how they were vetted, and the extent to which the business partnered with IT in these efforts.
We discovered that there was no single approach that all divisions followed. Working with representatives from the business, the Metis Strategy team identified, assessed, and prioritized most important and strategically-linked initiatives according to a universal set of criteria and across divisional silos to level-set the portfolio of IT initiatives. We designed and established new forums for joint business and IT decision-making, bringing together members from various functional areas across different business units as a means for breaking up silos and facilitating customer-oriented activities. Together with the corporate controller and senior finance executives, we a aligned the new demand management process with existing budgeting, planning, and process management processes.
Upon the successful development of the new demand management approach, the Metis Strategy team was involved in the training and implementation of the process as well, facilitating sessions with key players and supporting company-wide training sessions.
Result:
For the first time, leaders of each of the divisions clearly understand what their peers’ needs entail. This has led to better assessment and prioritization of initiatives across the bank rather than simply within the divisions, permitting more efficient and more effective utilization of resources.
The new process and decision-making forum enhanced the communication between business and IT leaders and provided senior-most executives with a more comprehensive and holistic view for strategic planning. It has also led to the cancelation of initiatives for the first time on a large scale in recent history at the bank. Metis Strategy has been asked to return to the bank whenever a new leader is named within IT to train them on the process and describe the history of it.
