Introducing the New Demand Management Experience
A smarter, guided way to manage demand — built on the same data you already have, ready to use today.
Introduction
With the Australia release, we're introducing a new way to experience demand management — embedded directly inside the Strategic Planning Workspace (SPW) or Portfolio Planning Workspace (PPW) depending on your license. It's a clean, guided interface powered by Playbooks that helps demand managers move work through the lifecycle without the guesswork.
The most important thing to know first: there is nothing to migrate. The new experience is a modern interface built directly on top of your existing demand data. Your demands, roles, and integrations are already there.
This post walks you through what's new, why it matters, and how to get value from it. For full technical details, visit the ServiceNow Product Docs.
Why Does This Matter?
The classic experience was built for IT intake. It worked — but it put the burden of process knowledge entirely on the user, and any governance changes required development effort. Teams outside IT had to work around a form that wasn't built for them.
| Area | Classic | New Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Interface | Dense form, all fields at once | Guided workspace, progressive steps |
| Guidance | None — Demand Managers must know the process | Playbook guides through lifecycle |
| Governance changes | Requires code and development | Visual designer, no-code, live instantly |
| Scope | IT intake only | Any team — IT, marketing, operations |
| Classic form | Primary experience | Stays on — both run side by side |
There Is No Migration — Here's Why
The first question we always hear is: "What do we need to migrate?" The answer is nothing — and understanding why changes how you approach the rollout entirely.
The new experience is a Next Experience UI layer built directly on top of the existing dmn_demand table. The data model has not changed. No records are moved. No schemas are altered.
What this means for you
- ✓ Same
dmn_demandtable — no new tables, no schema changes - ✓ Every existing demand appears automatically in the new experience on day one
- ✓ No new roles — existing demand roles provide access immediately
- ✓ Classic Core UI 16 form stays fully available — both share the same records in real time
- ✓ All existing workflows, related lists, and integrations continue unchanged
- → Getting started requires two lightweight steps: configure form views and create a Playbook (optional) — no development required
You can run the new experience alongside the classic form for as long as you need. There is no forced cutover.
New in Australia Release
Playbooks are now available in Demand Management. For the first time, demand managers can follow a structured, stage-based process directly in SPW or PPW — guided by the same Playbook framework already used in Project and Agile. No configuration expertise required to get started.
How Playbooks Fit into Demand Management
Playbooks are the defining capability of the new experience. They turn demand management from an unstructured, form-based activity into a repeatable, governed process — one that any team can follow consistently without needing to know the process by heart.
What ships out of the box: one default playbook — Demand Workflow — covering a standard IT demand lifecycle. It's designed as a starting point, not a final answer. In the Playbook Designer you can:
- Rename or add stages to match your actual governance process
- Define tasks that auto-generate when a stage is reached, assigned to the right people automatically
- Control which fields appear at each stage
- Apply different playbooks automatically based on demand type, department, or category
- Set automation triggers — escalate overdue reviews, notify stakeholders when thresholds are crossed
- Create multiple playbooks for different demand types, each with its own governance flow
Example use cases to consider for your organisation:
|
IT demand governance Separate playbooks for infrastructure requests and new product tech demands, each with their own approval gates and auto-assigned review tasks. |
Capital investment intake A playbook that adds a Finance approval stage automatically when the cost estimate exceeds a set threshold. |
|
Marketing campaign requests A lightweight playbook with only relevant fields, routing small campaigns differently from large ones. |
Enterprise-wide intake Multiple playbooks across business units — each governed independently, all visible in one place for portfolio-level prioritisation. |
(NEW) Demands Dashboard
Alongside the guided Playbook experience, the new Demand Management Experience also includes a built-in Demands Dashboard — a visual summary of your demand data available directly from the same workspace, without opening individual records.
The dashboard organizes into three tabs, with filters that apply across all widgets simultaneously:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | Demand distribution and analysis, inactive demands, overdue tasks, demands pending conversion, recently created demands, and risk vs. score |
| Financials | Planned cost, financial benefit, and return on investment (ROI) by investment type |
| Data Quality | Demand records missing key information — organised by demands, demands in screening and qualified states, demand tasks, and demand assessments |
You can filter by department, business unit, portfolio, program, or demand manager — and the selection applies to every widget on the dashboard at once. Selecting any widget drills directly into the underlying demand records.
📖 Demands Dashboard documentation →
AI Features in Demand Management
If your organization has Now Assist for SPM, several AI skills are available directly on demand records — each targeting a specific point of friction in the demand process.
| Feature | What it does | Persona | Benefit |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Demand Management Specialist | An AI Specialist with two child agents: a Demand Readiness Agent that validates submissions against your governance rules, and a Conversion Agent that auto-converts qualifying demands. | Demand Manager, Portfolio Manager, Approver | Removes the bottleneck — incomplete demands get triaged with clear feedback, qualifying demands convert automatically. The demand team moves from processing to deciding. |
| Demand Summarization | Generates a structured summary of any demand — covering business requirement, timeline, key risks, cost and effort, expected benefit, and risk of not acting. Triggered by selecting Summarize on the demand record. | Demand Manager, Portfolio Manager, Approver | Faster review at prioritization and approval stages — no need to read every field to understand a demand |
| Identify Similar Demands | Scans existing demands for contextual similarity across name, description, and business case. Flags matches at 85% or above. Results appear in a banner and the Similar Demands related list. Outdated records excluded automatically. | Demand Manager, Portfolio Manager | Reduces duplicate demand submissions and helps teams leverage prior decisions before investing in new intake |
| Conversational Demand Creation | Creates a demand through a guided chat conversation in the Employee Service Center portal. Now Assist asks contextual questions and auto-populates demand fields. Also available in Microsoft Teams and mobile if Virtual Agent channels are enabled. | Business Requester, Employee | Lowers the barrier to submitting well-structured demands — fewer incomplete records for demand managers to follow up on |
| Draft Docs with Now Assist | Within the Docs experience on a demand, Now Assist can summarise, elaborate, or shorten selected content — helping draft and refine business cases, requirements, and planning documents. Available as the Planning item doc generation and insights skill. | Demand Manager, Business Analyst | Faster time-to-draft on business cases and requirement documents — the most time-consuming part of the demand process |
Getting Ready to Roll Out
There's no single right way to adopt the new experience. Before you start configuring, it's worth taking a moment to think through how demand management actually works in your organization — who's involved, what steps matter, and where the friction usually lives.
The out-of-the-box Demand Workflow playbook is a good starting point. You can duplicate it, rename stages, and adjust it to fit your process — rather than building from scratch. Keep your form views lean, pilot with a small group first, and expand when you're ready.
Resources
- Demands Dashboard — Australia docs
- Demo videos — ServiceNow YouTube
- Ask a question — SPM Community Forum
- Demand Management Process Guide
