Demand vs Enhancement vs Request - What is the boundary between each one

[Blue]

Hell,

I am reaching out to learn from other health systems who have implemented the SPM, Agile 2.0 and ITSM modules in ServiceNow.

How did you establish clarity for your service owners of when to use Demand vs Enhancement vs Requests/Requested Items?

We will be going live later this year with SPM & Agile along with a rebuild of ITSM and I am looking for clear definitions of when to use each one.

[JR Laprime]

Our organization is working on refining the definitions of Projects and Enhancements, but presently this is what we use:

There are four types of IT work [our IT department] performs in ServiceNow: Incidents, Service Requests, Enhancements & Projects. Looking from left to right, overall, the typical time to complete each work type gets progressively longer.

Incidents and Service Requests encompasses the routine work of IT Service Management (ITSM): standard IT Services that allow our organization to perform their operational processes and daily tasks.

• Incidents are unplanned interruptions that require immediate attention & triaging because something’s broken.
• Service Requests make up Request Management and are the services our teams offer. They have routine and pre-defined processes for request and fulfillment, with standard turnaround time defined by the fulfillment team. Offered Services are found in our service catalog in the IT Service Portal or the ServiceNow application.

Through Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), we capture non-routine work: small or big wants from our customer that are outside of our standard IT services and require business input or justification.

• One of the key differences between an Enhancement and a Project is the size of the effort.
  • An enhancement is a non-routine request for new or modified features, functions, tools, applications, services, or reports that can be managed by three or fewer teams and is characterized as requiring less than 120 hours of IT resources. Note, team engagement is defined as 5 hours or more of effort in support of the initiative.
  • A project is defined as work that requires significant effort and support, impacting more than 120 hours of IT capacity (both people and infrastructure), more than three teams at 5 hours or more of work per team, or that will drive the immediate need for incremental ongoing IT support.
• Both of those record types begin with a Demand record in ServiceNow.

[shantiks]

Thanks for sharing this!  Our Epic teams will just be starting to use service requests within the next few weeks for provisioning access.  Our health system also differentiates enhancements from projects based on effort and number of teams who need to be involved, but enhancements are entered directly in the Service Portal (labeled routine requests) and projects start as demands which start as Concept Requests in the Service Portal.  We're looking at implementing the idea module instead to streamline intake for SPM.  Our leadership has changed the differentiation between the two a little bit, though, according to the Run, Grow, Transform model.  "Run" work is an enhancement. 

I think your diagram is excellent - so clear.  I'm curious if you use resource planning and how you apply that to the different types of work.  We use an operational resource plan for production support to cover Incidents and will also use it for the Service Requests, but there's a separate operational resource plan for enhancements.  Demands/projects have resource plans attached to them directly.  Thanks!

[JR Laprime]

We have aligned our Investment Classes to Gartner's recommendation of two distinctions: Change (which combines Grow and Transform) and Run.

For us, projects and enhancements can align as either Change or Run designations; it's really the size, scope, and change impact that drive whether the demand is an enhancement or a project.

We haven't explored Ideation in ServiceNow yet, but it may be something we revisit as we mature in SPM.

We also are using Resource Management.  Staff working on projects will have project-specific Resource Plans in order to track their planned vs actuals on project efforts (including Run classified projects).  Currently, Enhancements are considered operational work (in addition to all ITSM work such as Incidents and Service Requests) for us and are included in reserved capacity defined with a team's Operational Resource Plan.

Below is how we define our Time Tracking Categories.  All except the "Project" column are mapped back to our Operational Resource Plans.  When Resource Managers create their annual Operational Resource Plans, they take each of those categories into consideration so that the remaining resource availability with their teams are truly project availability.

I hope this helps, if you have any further questions, happy to discuss further.

[Blue]

Would you consider the IT network & server teams doing Enhancements? or is their work captured strictly in Request Management?