Demand Governance for Small Companies

[Chris Pearson]

Does your company ask you to wear multiple hats? Is the ServiceNow platform owner, also the lead developer? Does that same person also help shape IT budgets and develop a roadmap? If so, you might be asking yourself how could I possibly implement the gold standard of ServiceNow governance as described in their published white paper. Don't worry. I've got you. Let's focus on demands to start. A demand is simply a request from the business to enhance or deploy a new or existing capability in ServiceNow.

At a small company, this often comes in the form of someone chatting you up at the water cooler with a "wouldn't it be cool if we could do THIS in ServiceNow?" type of conversation. Let's be honest, not all of these ideas end up getting tracked and thrown into a spreadsheet or on a notepad once we get back to our office. But, if we focus on the desired outcome of demand management, which is an orderly and systematic method of intaking demands and evaluating them, we can still handle this at small companies which don't have a dedicated staff of demand managers.

You may or may not already be licensed with ServiceNow agile licenses. If you are, it makes sense to tackle the small job of configuring the Idea and Demand modules so that at a minimum you are able to ingest ideas via the OOB idea portal and then process them by turning them into demands as needed. From there you now have a record for each request that you can review and track which will help shape your tactical and strategic future.

If you don't have any agile licenses, create a catalog item which can be published to your portal for the same purpose. You'll end up with a RITM and Tasks which you can configure to prompt you to review and analyze requests from the business. Again, this simple way of tracking these requests in ServiceNow sets you up nicely for recording all proposed demands.

Now that conversation at the water cooler goes a little different and you can point the person back to your intake form.

If the decision making process lands on a single person or just a couple people, you now have a single repository of demands that you can lay out in front of you and compare against each other. It's orderly and allows for a systematic decision making process to take place, all without the need for post-it notes.