Request intake processes are beneficial to growing businesses, helping IT to understand a specific request, capture demand and much more.
Business users are dependent on IT teams to enable their strategies and solve their challenges.
When they ask IT to deliver a solution and the team confirms they can meet expectations, they expect results. However, many fail to take into consideration other IT priorities such as project work, incidents, requests, general maintenance work, and more.
What happens when IT is late on that request or project because of capacity restraints or other commitments? It can cause friction with the business and potentially within IT.
There are ways to avoid this.
Benefits of a Request Intake Process
It all typically start with an intake process. Intake processes provide an avenue for IT to understand a user’s specific request, whether it’s development or infrastructure-related. The objective of an intake process it to capture all of the demand and prevent work from occurring outside of this channel.
As organizations grow, it’s beneficial if there is a process to capture, review, approve if necessary, and perform work. With an intake process, organizations can typically achieve the following:
- Enhance planning and budgeting by having a full view of the project and request pipeline
- Optimize resource capacity as work is planned
- Remove non-value added requests and/or projects
- Standardize repetitive requests to optimize delivery and improve completion of Service Level Agreements and Operating Level Agreements
- Understand resource allocation by having a view of what resources are charging to what activities (projects, requests, runtime, etc.)
- Support roadmap development to incorporate strategic projects
Final Thoughts
Outside of defining a process, there are multiple items to consider such as governance, adoption and the corresponding tool suite.
Speaking from experience and lessons learned, I can stress that receiving buy-in and having the ability to consistently execute is critical.
You can have a process that works flawlessly in the tool suite, however, if teams don’t want to use the solution and leadership does not support it, the solution will often fail as do most implementations.