Demand for ServiceNow functionality should be managed in partnership with business stakeholders. Demand will change as business conditions, goals, and organizational objectives change. This means that the ServiceNow platform team and service delivery function must have capacity to meet business partner demand and be responsive to business partner requirements so that services provided are fit for purpose. Without demand management, the link between business value and service delivery can be lost.
Building that link comes down to four steps:
1. Create visibility by building a demand intake model
Establish a demand owner role to oversee information collection and prioritization related to demand requests. Establish a Demand Board – consisting of the Now Platform owner, process/domain owners, application architect, program manager, demand manager, and business relationship managers – to oversee the demand process and ensure strategic alignment. Identify and train demand requesters, and provide a system of engagement to collect demand requests. Start with a small group of trained requesters before opening demand ideation broadly. Develop simple scoring mechanisms to help demand submitters identify the business value of a new demand requirement. And best yet – use ServiceNow ITBM Demand Management as your demand management system of record!
2. Take control by enhancing, prioritizing and approving demands
Make sure to assign a demand owner to each demand request. To make a proper assessment of each demand, the demand owner should enhance the original request with additional information:
- Assign demands to a portfolio for grouping by strategic and operational objectives
- Capture requirements for the demand to be implemented, such as business, solution, quality and transition considerations
- Add decisions that need to be made – key choices that may affect the potential outcomw
- Identify risks that could impact the success or outcome of the initiative
- Estimate costs, starting with a “t-shirt size” estimate and adding capital, resource, and operational costs where appropriate
Determine if the demand is sufficiently large that it needs a project to manage it. For complex demands – those that involve transformational portfolios, significant resources or risk, or stakeholders across multiple business units – escalate them to the Demand Board for prioritization and approval.
3. Align approved demands to business outcomes
Get ahead of new demands for services and ServiceNow functionality by understanding business unit strategic plans and key KPIs. Map these to capabilities and your current services and ServiceNow roadmap for effective demand conversations.
Demand changes are often opportunities to discuss standardization, consolidation of legacy systems, or new ServiceNow functionality, to take advantage of increased scale. Lead these conversations by pitching around the specific business metrics that need to be hit, rather than technical or functional metrics that don’t mean much to the business. And incorporate examples where ServiceNow has helped other business partners achieve similar outcomes.
4. Increase velocity and plan future demand
Once an organization has a handle on demand with visibility to all demands, control of the demand review and assessment process, and alignment to business objectives, you can “up your game” by borrowing from the Agile playbook to increase the “velocity” of demand management. And all this can be done in ServiceNow.
More than just arriving at demand decisions more quickly, Agile techniques allow demand managers to test for changes in the business climate more often and enable them to tie demand to capacity in a nearly real-time manner.
In services-focused organizations, shift accountability for service demand management to Service Owners. Encourage Service Owners to look for opportunities to drive consolidation and reduction in costs, then reinvest savings in change programs aimed at addressing key challenges.
To learn more about this topic, additional resources include:
- Download the “Manage platform demand” Success Fundamental document from the Success Pillars page on the Customer Success Center, listed under the “Actively Lead the Transformation” Pillar.
- Demand and strategy worksheet on Community
Glen Kaminski, Sr. Research Manager, Best Practices Center of Excellence – Customers Success at ServiceNow
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