One fine morning, I got a call from the sales team stating there is a new customer inquiry, saying They have PPM implemented by one of the other partners; however, they don’t see benefit & value out of it; hence he needs our help to make it better. The next day, we, along with our ITBM practice team, connected with the client and tried to understand the problems
After having a call with the Customer, below were our findings
- Demand form has 12 Custom UI Actions/buttons, and additional appear and disappear at individual states of Demand
- Some the customization, neither contribute to technical outcome nor the business outcome
- The demand form has vast numbers of unnecessary sections & fields
- The form was having around more than 16 related list items
- Numerous custom business rules
- ACL's has been modified
- Plenty of alert and info messages at each phase of Demand.
- And custom tables.
Similar things we have seen for Project and other forms
The Customer asked us, can we do something and make it better and get users to feel comfortable using it? Because there was pushback from users, they prefer to use excel instead of ServiceNow. There were a lot of complaints from users on overall PPM implementation. We took customer process documents, and within a week, we prepared POC, which went quite well and the Customer awarded us Project in no time.
Later we delivered Project within four months and Project was successful; Within six months, the Customer was able to measure the success rate and see value in the PPM tool.
Now, what is the magic behind, such successful implementations?
Answer is Nothing!
We didn’t do anything, rather we understood Requirements, process, Business outcomes better and we know using configurations (with minimum customisation), we can achieve 90% of requirements
Solution :
- We rolled back the entire PPM to out of the box configuration
- We understood customer requirements & process better, worked together
- Our every piece of development work contributed to business outcome
- We have divided Demand into two categories Simple and advance
- In Simple Type - Form with significantly less number of fields, No approvals, less number of sections, and only three related list items
- In Advance Type - We have the most out of box fields, custom approval workflow, and less related list items
- The division was important because people who want to do simple implementations, don’t have to follow a lengthy approval workflow saves a lot of time for them.
- Autofill numerous fields, based on criteria - This saved time for the user while filling the form
- Not a single change in ACL's
- We had used workflow & demand tasks for deliverables and customer approvals - This has replaced almost all the custom buttons and all those approvals and tasks were fulfilled nicely using workflow and demand tasks
- All the Error or alert notifications were removed because they can be managed via demand tasks
- We have not created even a single custom table;
The Customer even agreed to our suggestions to omit a few process items, which require complex customization and spoil the user experience.
Hence we able to achieve 90% of customer requirements by doing NOTHING!
Learning:
You may be a great company in the region, you may have great developers, you may have great customers, but unless you understand requirement and process better, you won't be able to develop user-friendly business outcome solution.
ServiceNow has answers for almost all the PPM requirements, just that we need to Map requirements better. Do not rush to develop things, when things are ready-made available on the platform.
#servicenow #itbm #ppm #projectportfoliomanagement #projectmanagement
