New York! New York! PPM Updates Make us Sing!

[Sheila Llewelly]

Whenever my family members get together, we all gather in the family room for a rousing night of karaoke. One night we had friends visiting and they decided to get involved as well. Now, although we can hold our own behind a mic, none of us are being chased down by record labels wanting to sign us. But when my friend’s husband stepped up to the platform and started singing, “New York, New York!”, I seriously considered calling America’s Got Talent.

That is kind of how I felt when I went through the New York release for ITBM PPM. It gives me hope for the future while improving the present. We actually saw the first change coming. PPM is now integrated with Agile Development 2.0 and the Agile Development 1.0 is no longer available. We must activate both Agile Development 2.0 and Project Portfolio Management applications separately in order to associate stories with projects and execute them as part of an agile phase.

Another change is that we can now edit sprint details directly from the Agile Board. The Planning menu option has been removed, now we will use the Backlog Planning tab on the Agile Board. There is also a Daily Stand Up Boards menu option where we can track the progress of our scrum tasks in the Task Board view on the Sprint Tracking tab.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) provides a simplified, team – oriented approach to both project management and development. Through tracking the project from Idea to Close, PPM enables a team approach to not only tracking the timelines and tasks, but also gives a better view of how a project starts and what it takes for management to move forward on a proposed initiative. In the New York release, we can now convert an Idea directly to a story, epic, or project instead of creating just a Demand. The Innovation Management plugin installs the Ideas module where we can manage ideas from idea submission to execution. There is more collaboration with the idea submitter and other stakeholders, and we can convert selected ideas into work entities such as a Demand, Epic, Story, and Feature for tracking and management purposes.

The PPM – Agile Integration allows us to add stories, epics, Agile, and waterfall phases to our Agile, Waterfall, and Hybrid projects. The value set in the Execution type field determines the related links and lists that appear for each project type.
If we have legacy projects before the upgrade that only have stories associated with them, and the execution type is Null or Waterfall, they will be migrated to Agile after the upgrade to New York. Similarly, if only tasks are associated and Null is the execution type, these are migrated to Waterfall. If there are both tasks and stories associated with the project, then existing projects with the Null or Waterfall execution type will be moved to the Hybrid type.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, I typically use a Hybrid approach to project management. This integration between Agile Development 2.0 and PPM encourages this approach for project management and development by using a Waterfall method for project planning and tracking while allowing groups to utilize scrum methodologies for software development.

There are way too many improvements to PPM in the New York release for me to be able to address them all in this short blog. I encourage you, especially if you are just getting started with PPM, to go out to the ServiceNow Product Documentation site and read all about the New York release. The links will take you to more in-depth articles that will give a full view of implementing and using Project Portfolio Management. Even if you can’t sing a note, you can definitely appreciate New York! New York!