Forrester: ServiceNow is a Leader in value stream management solutions

As corporate budgets shrink worldwide, product and engineering leaders are making tough prioritization calls to focus on the initiatives that truly deliver business outcomes. They’re also looking at ways to optimize costs, especially those resulting from heavy manual processes.

The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q4 2022 could not have come at a more important time. At its core, value stream management (VSM) is all about delivering more business value while reducing bottlenecks to the flow of that value. VSM is more relevant now than ever before. I’m excited to announce ServiceNow is a Leader in VSM solutions, according to the Forrester report.

Although the rapid adoption of DevOps has helped many organizations improve the software lifecycles within value streams, silos between development and operations persist. Large organizations still see manual governance and risk activities slowing down delivery and frustrating developers and the customers they’re trying to serve.

Those same organizations want to apply VSM concepts to many different forms of value streams, not just those founded on software delivery.

Some companies have been successful in defining business outcomes for their value streams and populating metrics to track value that connect all the way back to engineering efforts. This is relatively rare, however. Most still operate in silos where the highest-level objectives and key results (OKRs) aren’t always connected to the work that development teams are doing. VSM is changing that mindset.

Improving visibility and experiences

What we believe sets our VSM offering apart is the breadth of the ServiceNow VSM story: encompassing the full value stream from customer ideas to planning, building, releasing, operating in production, and bringing customer usage insights back for a tight feedback loop.

We use the Now Platform® and its single data model to connect every step along the way. Linking the world of DevOps to the work you already manage in ServiceNow enables seamless experiences and heightened visibility. But we believe VSM can go beyond visibility to an agenda that focuses on cost and efficiency.

Increasing value in regulated organizations

Nowhere is that more apparent than in regulated enterprises. “ServiceNow is a great choice for enterprises in regulated industries that prize speed, compliance, and value delivery at scale,” according to the Forrester report.

VSM done well can help organizations focus on funding the right things and making quick adjustments as situations change. When Western & Southern Financial Group, for example, wanted to bust silos and create a central location to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand, it selected ServiceNow to help.

By gaining centralized visibility across teams with ServiceNow® Strategic Portfolio Management, Western & Southern is able to capture the business value of each of its investments—and implement effective governance processes to reduce program risks and provide transparency.

“By using ServiceNow, our portfolio governance committee and executives get the information they need to prioritize demands, maximizing the business value that IT delivers,” explains Lisa White, IT project portfolio analyst at Western & Southern.

“Our investment decisions are transparent,” she adds. “Everyone knows what IT is working on, so when a strategic technology investment decision is made, people understand the business drivers behind the decisions and the potential impacts.”

Improving for faster time to value

“Top-scoring elements of [ServiceNow’s] strategy included excellent product support, planned enhancements, and a vast partner ecosystem,” according to the Forrester report.

The report stated that our VSM solution “delivers top scores for third-party integration, which allowed reference customers to integrate their more ‘obscure tools.’” To us, this is a testament to our extensive partner ecosystem.

We’re not surprised by these results. Recent enhancements to our VSM product have sped up time to value and made it simpler to implement VSM capabilities.

Many ServiceNow customers have begun to automate governance without impacting the day-to-day lives of development teams. They use the Now Platform to keep developers in the tools they want to use while eliminating administrative overhead associated with changes. This accelerates delivery while retaining high quality and low risk.

The overall VSM movement is just getting started. At ServiceNow, we continue to work with customers to meet them where they are to help them achieve the outcomes VSM promises: maximum value and minimal waste. We’re all in!

Download the full, complimentary Forrester report.

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