As of this article, I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem for 15ish years. I've been an admin, dev, platform owner, and consultant. If there's one paradigm I've seen over and over its ServiceNow customers DROWNING in demands (whether or not you're using SPM).
There's a very SIMPLE mindset that traps platform owners. The reflexive instinct that you must fulfill all requests and feedback. But believe me...
THIS IS NOT YOUR MISSION
Your mission is to prioritize the highest impact features and fixes.
Its ok to say no to someone's notification preferences. Its ok to say no to deviations from OOB state sequences. Its ok not to cater to individual preferences. You'd be shocked how many times the effort to build something is 10-100x the return to the business.
HOW TO SCREEN & QUALIFY WHAT TO BUILD
BUSINESS IMPACT:
- Does this directly impact CORE business operations? Because I guarantee you, you already have requests in your product that *DO*.
- How does the work align to business goals? If the business has done large scale merger & acquisition activity, maybe its time to prioritize that Catalog overhaul to help make the business coherent.
CONSENSUS:
- Is this request from a process participant, or the process owner? In either case has one consulted the other? Each process area is a stakeholder to your platform. Forcing the participants and process owners to reach consensus on requests can save you tons of demand assessment time.
- Have we heard this before? A plurality of the same requests means an experience is high friction for a much broader audience, and *could* justify build resources.
QUANTIFICATION:
- Is the damage or benefit quantified in time? If so what's the ratio of time spent building vs time reclaimed by the business?
- Is the damage or benefit quantified in money? If so, what's the ratio on cost of labor building vs cost/revenue opportunity to the business?
STRATEGY & ROADMAP:
- Is there a larger scale initiative in this overarching theme? Sometimes you need to bundle a myriad of requests into a themed release. Think "this is the incident notification overhaul release", or "this is Change Management v3".
- Is the scale of the thing large enough to win me a political ally? Politics IS strategy. Sometimes you do work you wouldn't necessarily agree to in order to win allies aiding in more important initiatives.
