When to use Demand vs Project vs Collaborative Workspace vs Visual Task Boards

[jothurmond]

How does your organization determine when to use a Demand, a Project, a Collaborative Workspace, or a Visual Task Board in ServiceNow?

We’re refining our internal guidelines and looking to better align our work intake and tracking processes with best practices. Specifically, we’re interested in how other organizations define thresholds or criteria for when an effort should be captured as a:

• Demand (e.g., new initiative, requires approval)

• Project (e.g., execution of approved work)

• Collaborative Workspace (e.g., team-level coordination)

• Visual Task Board (e.g., lightweight task tracking)

Do you use cost, effort, cross-functional impact, or other factors to decide? Have you established clear examples or guardrails to guide users?

Any insights, documentation practices, or decision models would be appreciated.

[Mark Manders]

It does depend on your organization. I have worked with organizations that use everything (including portfolio and program management), but also with companies that used demand as a way for users to put new ideas/changes into the system and they just used that as work items. 

I think your 4 points are exactly that: use it for those examples. Although I would watch out with VTBs, because if you only put 'lightweight' work on there, you run the risk that they don't have an overview of the complete workload (but again: depends on your organization). 

Cost/Budgets are often used on projects and programs are ideal to combine cross functional/cross departmental dependencies. But I can't answer what works best for you. I have seen implementations with very complex logic and implementations where companies had one Portfolio (per year) because that was how they worked and the programs were set every year, based on the goals for that year.