Jabian Enhances Client’s Ability to Forecast & Staff Projects

The Client:

Our client is one of the leading North American tire distributors, serving over 70,000 customers in the U.S. and Canada from over 140 distribution centers. Jabian partnered with the IT Demand Management Office (DMO) to develop a tool to enhance their project estimation and forecasting capabilities. The DMO’s primary responsibility is to serve as a liaison between business and IT to ensure the business has the necessary tools to achieve its goals.

The Challenge:

In the past, the client’s IT organization frequently had a reputation for large budget overages and missed deadlines due to an inability to appropriately scope and estimate projects. These issues had begun to erode trust with the business, which doubted IT’s ability to successfully address their needs in a cost-effective and timely manner. The IT organization lacked consistent estimation processes and tools to forecast projects; making it difficult to produce reliable estimates and ensure there were enough people to complete projects on time.

The Strategy:

A Jabian team of demand management experts led the effort, working with DMO leaders and staff to transform the way the group estimated and forecasted projects. Working side by side the team rolled out the transformation by:

  • Building a demand management model to input all project information and resource requirements
  • Developing dashboards to visualize the gap between IT resource labor (supply) and project requirements (demand)
  • Creating dashboards to understand financial impact based on project requirements
  • Using the model to delay project start dates based on prioritization and resource constraints
  • Establishing a detailed training guide to ensure the appropriate client stakeholders could use and maintain the model in the future

The Outcome:

Because of the effort, the IT DMO could prioritize over $107M in project requests down to the FY17 budget of $40M. This ensured that IT would start the year with the right priorities rationalized to budget and staff. IT leadership was also able to use the model to identify staffing shortages by skill type. This enabled them to develop a focused hiring plan and ensure the right volume and skill mix were available to deliver their commitments on time.

Jabian’s Resource Capacity Management Dashboard

Jabian’s Financial Capacity Management Dashboard

Insights