Demand management is commonly defined as a planning methodology that businesses utilize to help gather and prioritize new ideas, projects and needs throughout the portfolio. According to a study published with the Resource Management Institute, demand management is a critical success factor in managing a portfolio, and is most valuable when the process can maximize how it captures “the real strategic commitment of the organization and merge it with the past ongoing activities” to build a company’s portfolio. Once a company has defined its vision and overall strategy, demand management helps companies continue to address that strategy while collecting new ideas and assessing how they fit into the current vision.
Gartner® defines demand management as a capability that “enables users to capture and manage incoming requests (including new ideas or changes to existing work) for planned and unplanned projects. This generally includes approval workflows, and flexibility for various project types, and different styles of project management.” When considering a resource management solution, it’s key that it provides users with the ability to demand plan, including project intake workflows, role or placeholder resources, resource request workflows, and the ability to incorporate skills and competency management.
Tempus Resource offers multiple features to help customers achieve successful demand management, including:
- Project Intake workflows that are designed to shepherd projects through the intake process, including customizable workflows, forms, and dynamic routing with conditionality to save time and improve decision making through easily customizable next step routing. Additionally, Tempus Project Intake workflows help organizations maintain governance by ensuring that each workflow is designed to get the right people involved in decision making about what projects need approval and when.
- Users can define the backbone structure of a new Project Intake workflow with various states, defined as the various stages associated with the workflow including innovation, intake, stage gate, and approval project.
- Resource Request workflows are fast and come with a request process that is fully integrated with a company’s resource forecasts, so implementing any resource management workflow can take minutes to execute. Tempus includes backup approvers to avoid workflow interruptions or delays, with tracking and logging for auditing accuracy.
- With Scribe, Tempus’s decision management capability, users can memorialize and capture key demand management decisions within the platform, enabling more direct communication between users and better understanding of decisions and data within Tempus.
- With role or placeholder resources, set up as Demand Planning Resources in Tempus, both project and resource managers can forecast allocation based on the type of person needed without needing to determine at that planning stage who can actually take on the work.
- With Tempus’s What If Analysis, analyzing the demand, from project ideation to demand resource planning, has never been easier. Whether annual planning or deciding if you can take on new work mid-year, What If scenarios allows you to make informed decisions on the work you take on.
Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry was included in the 2022 Gartner® Critical Capabilities™ of Adaptive Project Management and Reporting, which included an evaluation of Demand Management. ProSymmetry, a global leader in resource portfolio management, provides resource management solutions to large enterprises including many Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies with its proprietary platform Tempus Resource. Tempus Resource is a purpose-built resource forecasting and capacity planning solution for strategic business decisions. With capabilities including bulk resource forecasting, skills and talent management, portfolio and resource capacity reporting, and interactive scenario planning and what-if analysis, Tempus gives organizations actionable intelligence and cutting-edge analytics. For more information, visit www.prosymmetry.com.
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