At ServiceNow, we’re very aware of the speed at which things change across every industry. It seems disruptors are everywhere, so a key objective for us is to help customers anticipate change, use data to identify the best response, and have the enterprise agility to implement that response in the fastest, least disruptive way possible.
But nobody could have predicted the massive, rapid disruption resulting from a global pandemic unprecedented in modern history. While the impact has been devastating, we’ve been gratified to see so many customers leverage ServiceNow solutions to help them manage this crisis. From project to resource and investment management, companies around the world have used ServiceNow to respond to this challenge in an insightful way that will benefit them as we move beyond it.
Resilience and recovery
With progress being made, we can focus our attention on the recovery of our businesses. To assist in that effort, we’ve introduced new features in the IT Business Management (ITBM) solution that couldn’t be timelier in their ability to help our customers optimize their businesses, plan for the future and return to maximum enterprise agility.
Simulate multiple investment scenarios
To strengthen business and regain footing on budgets, you need to reevaluate projects and the financial and human resources assigned to them. Some may need to be postponed, some cancelled, and others pushed forward to take advantage of new opportunities.
Even under normal circumstances, balancing project and demand backlogs with available financial and human resources can be an arduous process. The chaotic environment Covid-19 brings is more complicated than ever, and it’s even more important that your investment decisions consistently deliver maximum value to your customers and stakeholders.
To support this, you need easy visibility into your project backlog. You need the ability to prioritize projects in the context of available teams and budget, and you need to see how potential tradeoffs could impact the value delivered to the business.
Scenario planning feature in the ITBM Paris release is designed to help you evaluate and reevaluate your investments. Portfolio managers can simulate multiple investment scenarios, each with a different set of projects and budgets. By comparing them side-by-side against key objectives, you can identify and approve the best scenario. From there, you can track progress as it is executed.
The ITBM Paris release’s enhanced portfolio workbench allows portfolio managers to:
- Review their project backlog.
- Simulate and compare multiple scenarios.
- Track progress of approved projects.
Reduce the complexity of resource planning
Due to the delays caused by COVID-19, many organizations will need to extend projects beyond their initial timeline or shift them to entirely new schedules. Managers will need to adjust resources to ensure they’re available to work on projects in those new timelines, and that they’re fully utilized in the meantime.
Whether plans change due to strategic adjustments, unanticipated delays, work from home efforts, or furloughs, moving projects in such a way that all their allocated resources move along with them is difficult. And recreating resource plans from scratch is a tedious process.
To address this, the resource allocation workbench has been enhanced to simplify changes in resource allocations so that projects are fully staffed and employees and contract workers are neither over-nor under-utilized.
ITBM Paris allows resource managers to:
- Alter projects without having to reallocate resources.
- Replace and substitute team members with ease.
- Allocate resources for any desired time frame without requiring manual adjustments.
Synchronize data among the tools you’re already using
As the business environment gets back on track, many projects will be reevaluated and changes in scope will need to be reflected across multiple tools.
You may be planning in ServiceNow ITBM, while your development teams are executing work in Jira® or Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO). But managing work across disparate systems is problematic. At the very least, project managers (PM’s) spend time switching back and forth between systems trying to get a clear picture of the project underway.
Most organizations prefer a single system of record. With new integrations in the Paris release, developers using JIRA or ADO execution tools can automatically synch the status back to ServiceNow at the program or portfolio level.
Work coming from demand in ITBM, defined in Epic, and planned in sprints can be executed by teams in Jira, with the data automatically shared and synched between the systems for executive reporting, so customers can correlate work being executed with the originating plan of record, and users can save time and remain in their tool of choice.
ITBM Paris allows product managers to manage agile work in a single system of record—ServiceNow. With synchronized mapping:
- Stories created in NOW are automatically mirrored in Jira.
- Issues created in Jira are automatically mirrored in NOW.
- Updates made in either system are synched with the other.
Get complete visibility into the team’s work
Most organizations are now doing team-level agile, and most have multiple agile teams working collaboratively to achieve common outcomes. But few have mastered the ability to organize effectively across teams. That’s detrimental to the organization’s capacity to create realistic plans and accurately track progress along the path of delivery, both of which are now more critical than ever.
With the Paris release, new scrum capabilities provide significantly increased visibility across multiple teams working toward a specific outcome. This allows PMs to coordinate and organize work, view dependencies, get insight into sprint capacity and prevent teams from becoming overloaded.
ITBM Paris provides product managers, product owners, scrum masters, and program managers with a single, centralized timeline view that illustrates:
- What work is defined.
- Which teams are contributing.
- Team workload against capacity.
- Work dependencies.
Simplify the on-boarding and retirement of business apps
To understand their IT investments, organizations need accurate, current, business application inventories or registers. But application portfolio owners and enterprise architects get minimal tool support when it comes to standardizing the process of registering and decommissioning business applications.
With the Paris release, organizations gain governance and control over the onboarding and decommissioning of business applications in the CMDB. In addition, ServiceNow provides OOTB workflows to manage and support the work and requests assigned to enterprise architects, replacing an ad-hoc process.
ITBM Paris provides enterprise architects and application owner’s APM self-service workflows that:
- On-board new business applications in the CMDB with approvals.
- Deliver an OOTB project template to decommission and retire business applications.
- Support the Architecture Review Board (ARB) process by providing Enterprise Architecture teams with automation.
If you’d like information on how the ServiceNow ITBM solution can help you optimize your business, plan for the future and achieve maximum enterprise agility, please contact us.
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