10 Things I love about PPM...

[anna_scheib]

As recently announced, our ServiceNow Education Services team just introduced a new PPM course -/community/learn/blog/2014/06/06/servicenow-education-services-team-introduces-project-portfolio-man... and I wanted to chime in and give you a glimpse into what your project teams are learning in this class:

1. How to bridge the gap between IT and the PMO (or business operations) by taking advantage of our single system of record where all tasks — planned or operational - live on the same platform. We teach you how to create traceability to ITSM processes outside of PPM and monitor schedule impacting work right on the project's Gantt chart.
2. Use standard platform capabilities to add efficiency and automate manual tasks — How about automated weekly team reminders to update task progress or submit a time card? Or a system generated notification whenever a project task is updated or closed? Or a live feed post to keep teams and project stakeholders informed?
3. Eliminate the need for paper based Word reports that become obsolete the minute you send them by learning to build custom project summary and detailed project work reports and post them to status dashboards. Or schedule them for weekly delivery to stakeholders.
4. Build a project schedule from the grounds up or reuse a project that follows a similar framework. Take advantage of project and task creation utilities to efficiently create the project scope and schedule. Your work is in MS Project? Import it!
5. Use the project's Gantt chart to view the current Project schedule, forecast completion dates, identify the critical path, view key task dependencies.
6. Modify the project schedule and create parent-child relationships, finish-to-start relationships, extend, add, and delete tasks and relationships, all right here from the Gantt chart.
7. Simplify monitoring of the project progress and health by implementing a risk register, an issue log, a milestones list, leveraging SLAs for critical tasks, and setting up alerts for important events (state, priority, risk changes, etc.).
8. Learn to manage resources using the Resource Management application and track capacity, utilization, allocations, and actual time worked in real time with resource reporting.
9. Master the internals of project costs and effort tracking. Learn to estimate and plan, populate actual spending and time worked over the course of the project, and automate to have terminal level work elements update their parent and the project overall with actual financial and effort information.
10. Leverage the Knowledge Base to implement and maintain a lessons learned database — essential for improving project processes going forward.

Need another reason to attend the class?   How about no prior experience required? In this class we do not assume prior knowledge of the platform and we teach the fundamentals of navigation and usage as well as the necessary administration skills to configure the Project, Time Cards, and Financial Management applications.

Whether you are a Project Manager, a member of the PMO, or an individual contributor without project management background, this training will quickly ramp you up on the PPM application and teach you to leverage the ServiceNow platform for all things Project Management.

The first upcoming course will be in a virtual classroom on June 25-26. The first live course will be in San Diego from July 17-18.

If you have any questions about the course, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at anna.scheib@servicenow.com