codeBeamer ALM offers extended features focusing on demand management. To understand how any tool can support this discipline, it's important to define the critical issues of demand management throughout the lifecycle.
We have collected the following issues that need to be tackled by a demand management tool and that are necessary to support both demand managers and demand execution staff across the organization.
These shortlisted issues can be easily solved by using codeBeamer Application Lifecycle Management, and its specific features dedicated to demand management:
Issue 1: Prioritization of demands (ranking, voting, decision-making on demand priorities)
Many business units generate demand across the organization. Demands usually originate from different office locations, all with their own priorities. The ability to share demand requests is necessary especially in distributed operations, with an option to rank (vote on) demands for managers. Making decision on the final ranking of demands is a key issue that needs support from a collaboration platform that offers functionality around demand management.
Issue 2: Full traceability along the demand route
We define „Demand route” as the process of demand generation, demand evolution, and the conversion of demands into requirements for further processing. In most cases, demand collection, approval, and execution is managed by different systems at large organizations. Therefore the demand route is only partly traceable and there is limited visibility on the demand execution status.
Issue 3: Demand Change Management
Any change request related to a demand must trigger a procedure that includes change approval, change propagation, and the management of change execution and information sharing throughout the demand management process down to development. Efficient communication and collaboration is essential to simplify approval at the management level, and to channel the information correctly for implementation.
Issue 4: Effort estimation for demand realization
This issue is among the most challenging ones, as estimation has to be based on execution planning data. The approval and prioritization of demands should be influenced by effort and resource requests. Therefore the right demand management system has to support effort estimation and lead time assessment.
Issue 5: Quality Assurance of demand execution
Demand managers expect full traceability of demand execution including the final quality performance. In cases where demand management is connected to ALM system KPIs such as test results, quality indicators should be available.
codeBeamer 7.2 offers a new set of features to address the highlighted issues along the demand management lifecycle. codeBeamer ALM supports demand collection, voting, and provides a ranking mechanism. Through integration with its Application Lifecycle Management feature set, codeBeamer supports the assignment of approved demands to project managers for execution. Out platform provides a facility for collaboration and communication along the entire life cycle. The use of the integrated QA features helps those involved in demand management evaluate the results of any project.
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