COORDINATING THE NEEDS OF INTERNAL CUSTOMERS
The team had several customers within the organization, each with their own specific needs, requirements and expectations regarding the IT services provided by the team. An advisory board, similar to a change advisory board (CAB) found in ITIL, was needed. However, merely making decisions and planning changes and feature requests would not suffice. Getting input on changes and new feature requests would surely help, but the team would still be left with the challenge of prioritizing its entire workload. This included prioritizing different ITIL processes, such as both incidents and service requests, against change requests. As a first step, weekly planning meetings were arranged and key stakeholders from each internal customer invited.
The visualization of the total workload was an eye opener to all the stakeholders. It was easy for them to see that pushing more work on the team when they were already at full capacity would not move things forward. Just getting the stakeholders together in the same room created a world of difference compared to meeting with them individually.
Constructive discussions started and synergies between the stakeholders emerged. Above all, the stakeholders
realized that the team had limited capacity and that there was a need to prioritize what was most important for the entire organization, not only for the
individual function.
There were still times when everything seemed urgent and of equal importance, but instead of breaking the WIP limit of the ‘to do’ column, the team found