Enhancing Demand Management for a Leading Financial Services
Organisation 
A well-known name in the financial services sector in Ireland, our client has a strong presence both domestically and internationally and plays a pivotal role in supporting economic growth through a wide range of financial services. Like many large organisations, they work with multiple internal and external stakeholders, including contractors, across complex delivery portfolios. Business demand and technology delivery is across a complex web of “factory” and “consumer” teams.
The Challenge
While the organisation had made significant strides in standardising its software development practices with Atlassian, its Project Managers were increasingly overwhelmed by the volume and variability of demands from consumer teams. Requests often failed to arrive, or arrived without a clear scope or estimates, leaving PMs under-informed for the annual budgeting cycle and creating persistent challenges in resource planning and capacity forecasting.
Without a structured way to capture demand, translate it into actionable work, and forecast effort, prioritisation became inconsistent, workloads were hard to balance, and the organisation struggled to gain a reliable view of future resource requirements.
Delivering a Demand Management System
VMotion partnered with the organisation to build a robust demand management framework powered by Jira Service Management (JSM) and Jira Software. We developed a repeatable pattern that involved a custom JSM portal where internal customers could define demand in terms of E1, E2 and E3 effort estimates, ensuring that requests were scoped with consistent effort classifications at the point of submission.
The design was informed by driving consensus across multiple stakeholders to ensure that the solution was built both once, and right first time.
Each demand submission was then translated into Jira initiatives, giving the PMO and delivery teams a centralised view of incoming work. The entire lifecycle of each initiative was captured and tracked within Jira, enabling structured governance, transparent status tracking, and alignment to delivery planning.
As subsequent teams encountered the same challenge, the solution could be iterated again for minimal cost.
Measurable Results
The new demand management approach dramatically improved how the organisation handled incoming work.
Clear effort estimates at the point of intake enabled PMs to assess and prioritise work with confidence.
Translating demand into structured initiatives gave leadership and delivery teams reliable data to forecast resource needs and plan capacity proactively.
With a centralised Jira view of all initiatives, allocating capacity across teams became systematic rather than ad hoc.
With a centralised Jira view of all initiatives, allocating capacity across teams became systematic rather than ad hoc.
Value Delivered
By adopting a disciplined demand management process on the Atlassian platform, the organisation removed ambiguity from planning and significantly strengthened operational predictability. PMs now operate with clearer expectations and fewer surprises, while leadership benefits from a dependable foundation for resourcing decisions and strategic planning.
The client continues to rely on this solution, with the demand management framework forming a key part of their delivery planning and execution practice.
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