Demand scoring is a crucial process in project and portfolio management, enabling objective evaluation and comparison of relevant demands. While technical details of scoring are covered elsewhere, this article aims to provide a clear, non-technical overview of the purpose and methods of demand scoring. There are three different approaches to get to the actual scoring, however this is well covered in the following pdf. https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/...
There are 2 mechanisms that can be used to evaluate demands. The recommended approach will be reviewed in the conclusion.
- Demand Workbench (bubble chart) – multi-dimension evaluation
- Demand scoring – single-dimension evaluation
- Listed as “Score” under Assessment Data
First there are fields on the demand record we need to become familiar with.
Figure 1: Demand scoring fields
Impact:
- This is related to the business criticality of the affected service.
- Action: Define the criteria for impact often this is defined something like
- 1 - High (Company)
- 2 - Medium (Multiple Users/Department)
- 3 - Low (Single User)
T-Shirt size
- This is related to how big this demand is in terms of effort. This value selected depends on the size of the organization.
- Action: Provide guidance/definitions around what each size represents.
- Field independently (OOB) is reflected as the Size of the bubble on the Demand workbench.
Risk
- Typically calculated from assessment (although can use other mechanisms – see above pdf)
- Assessment: Risk is calculated from stakeholder questions, with an overall weight of 25. The questions and their respective weights are:
- Time Delay (20%): "Is this susceptible to time delays?" (Scale 1-10)
- Business Case (15%): "Does this fulfill compliance & regulatory requirements?" (Scale 1-10)
- Business Expansion (20%): "Does this require additional infrastructure or business expansion?" (Scale 0-10)
- Commitment (20%): "Does this contain significant dependencies?" (Scale 1-10)
Value
- Typically calculated from assessment (although can use other mechanisms – see above pdf)
- Assessment: Value is calculated from Impact (60%) and Financial Return (40%) fields:
- Impact (60%):
- High (Company) = 10
- Medium (Multiple Users) = 5
- Low (Single User) = 1
- Financial Return (40%):
- Located on the “Financials” tab of the demand.
- Action: Update these values based on your organization’s needs.
- $1,000,001 and above = 10
- $750,001 - $1,000,000 = 9
- $500,001 - $750,000 = 8
- $250,001 - $500,000 = 6
- $100,001 - $250,000 = 4
- $50,001 - $100,000 = 2
- Below $50,000 = 1
- Impact (60%):
Score (Referred to as Demand scoring – single-dimension above)
- Overall score of the demand. This is a single score that can be used to assess the demand
- Calculated based on three key metrics: Risk, Value (ROI), and Size.
- The formula for the Demand Score is: ([Inverted Risk rating]+[Inverted Size rating]+[Value rating])/3 à inverted is 10 minus the value so this can also be described as ([10 - Risk]+[10 - Size]+[Value rating])/3
In reviewing these 2 assessment mechanisms (Demand Workbench and Demand Scoring) both use the same values of Risk, Value and Size. The preferred approach is to use the Demand Workbench as this allows a 3-dimentional view (below) to visualize in a very granular way these scores to allow stakeholder to make an informed decision of what demands should be approved and which should be deferred. The Demand scoring value is determined with the higher value being preferable as this would imply a lower risk, smaller size yet higher value effort however it is difficult to visual this data and compare visually.
Figure 2: Demand workbench
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