Cloud Demand Management

Create a business-led view of Demand: The first trap many organisations fall into is not building what their consumers need or want. Often the determination of 'what' to build is left to technical professionals rather than designing and working backwards from the consumer’s needs. As any product company knows, products live and die based on how well they are accepted by the target audience.  It is no different when you are creating cloud products for internal consumption.Too often, cloud adoption and value realisation are choked because the product or service launched was what the internal IT function thought users should have, rather than what they needed.

As a starting point to improve business alignment, an organisation should seek to understand the current and expected demand for Cloud services by cataloguing new demand, such as new projects, platform features and use cases, and existing demand such as maintenance, support, and concierge services - essentially anything that generates work for your Cloud teams. This demand management function is a critical communication link, enabling application teams a channel to be “heard”, whilst helping central cloud teams prioritise by creating a single view of the backlog where they can apply filters to assess “request” (i) re-occurrence volume (ii) business value, and (iii) risk. This simple but powerful process is a key cultural enabler, helping the cloud team shift from are-active to pro-active internal cloud service model.

Understand the internal customer experience & “consumer journey”: It is important to understand your internal cloud user's primary interactions with the systems and central cloud team, and identify the constraints and inhibitors experienced by end users, and the associated business impact. Typically, cloud services were introduced using defined project delivery methods that focused on risk management and traditional ITSM principles. The main drawback with this was that solutions were delivered as a “project” rather than establishing an ongoing organisational capability. Work was focused on a “point in time” project scope and set of deliverables, resulting in cloud services being hidden behind layers ofIT process, ITSM tools, SecOps-enforced feature restrictions, and possibly the cloud team itself. Consequently, the internal “consumer journey” is “sub-optimal”.

A simple but powerful enabler to support the shift to modern cloud-centric ways of working is to create a small cross-functional team consisting of cloud users and cloud providers to map out and create a visual depiction of an end-to-end cloud user journey, identifying the points of constraint and the associated impact. An excellent consumer journey starts with thinking about (i) User Requirements – are they understood, (ii) Offerings – are they aligned to users requirements, (iii) Experiences – can user consume the offerings in the way they want, (iv) Assurances – provision of frictionlessly compliance, (v)Value – how do we measure effectiveness of the process.

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