Portfolio management

[Priyanka Pandav]

1.1.          Demand Management 

The Demand Management application consists of tools for capturing, centralizing, and assessing strategic and operational demands. It also provides a single location for managing all the demand information. These settings include:

As a demand manager, assess the ideas submitted through the Idea Portal or ideation module and promote the feasible ideas to demands.

You can track the progress of an accepted idea as it moves through the demand life cycle (idea to a demand, to a project, enhancement, change, or defect).

A typical workflow for you as the demand manager is as follows:

• Work on a demand to assess the feasibility, effort, and cost of the demand and create a business case for approval of the demand.
• Create demand tasks, such as an initial feasibility review, cost estimate, and effort estimate, to delegate activities to specialized resources or groups. For example, a demand manager can create demand tasks for assessing the cost associated with a software upgrade and the resources required.
• Assign demand tasks to a business analyst, resource user, or an appropriate group. The assigned resource or group then creates a cost and resource plan to help the demand manager assess and qualify the demand. 

Basics of Demand Management

• Set up the application: Plan, create stakeholders and assessment categories, and create bubble charts.
• Assess ideas: Review and analyse submitted ideas before promoting ideas to demands.
• Create and add details to the demands: Create demands and add demand tasks, stakeholders and assessments, and evaluate and qualify demands.
• Use the Demand Management application or the demand workbench to compare and assess demands, and promote demands to projects, enhancements, changes, or defects.

1.2.          Innovation Management

The Ideas application enables you to gather and evaluate ideas efficiently, and to quickly identify and process the ideas with the greatest potential for implementation.

The Idea Portal accelerates and organizes idea gathering, evaluation, selection, and execution. The idea manager or demand manager evaluates submitted ideas and promotes accepted ideas to demands, epics, features, or stories.

Maintain separate data storage and control access

You can use the Idea module to do the following:

• Store ideas and categories belonging to different departments, products, or business units separately.
• Store and organize ideas, enable voting, and, if your organization is large, you can configure different portal pages with unique sets of categories, for example, for HR, IT, and Support.
• Control access, allowing only the users of a specific business unit or department to submit and view ideas belonging to a specific category through the Idea Portal by creating access-control lists in the table that you want to use for categories. For example, if you do not want users outside the payroll department to view the ideas associated with the category salary, create ACLs with read access, at least, to the employees of Payroll department in the parent table that is used to derive the category, Salary. The ACLs restrict the employees outside the payroll department from viewing the ideas associated with the category salary.

Organize idea submissions by using categories

An idea category represents a theme for organizing idea submissions. All ideas submitted through the Idea Portal must be associated with at least one idea category. You can use values from an existing table or create new idea categories for organizing your idea. Users select one or more idea categories, configured by an admin, to associate with their idea when they submit it.

Submit, view, and subscribe to ideas

The Idea Portal is where you share your product, feature, change, or enhancement ideas. Submit your ideas, view and subscribe to the ideas of other users, and track the progress of a subscribed idea.

Collaborate on ideas

Collaborate on an idea with other submitters and stakeholders. Add comments or reply to comments to request more information or answer questions. Vote for the ideas you would like to see developed. For more information see, Collaborate on ideas.

Manage and evaluate ideas

The idea manager reviews submitted ideas and, if necessary, requests more information, and then chooses to accept or reject the idea. The number of votes on an idea helps in assessing the popularity of and demand for the idea.

Convert the accepted ideas to a demand, epic, story, or feature based on how you would like to execute your idea. Use relevant options such as Epic, SAFe epic, or Improvement initiative based on the plugins installed such as PPM Standard, Agile Development 2.0 and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). After creating a demand or a project, change the state of the idea to track its status during different stages of development.

1.3.          Portfolio Management

With the ServiceNow® Portfolio Management application, you can create portfolios which are collections of related programs, projects, and demands. You can then perform financial planning and monitor the status and progress of these portfolios.

You must have the it_portfolio_manager role to manage a portfolio. The Portfolio Management application provides these capabilities to the portfolio manager:

• Create a portfolio by adding related programs, projects, and demands.
• Perform annual portfolio planning by selecting demands, projects, and programs.
• Track the progress and status of all the programs, projects, and demands that are part of the portfolio. You can track the costs, resources, schedules, risks, and issues.

[MathewT]

can we assign multiple portfolio managers to a single Portfolio ? 

[Vittanala Siva]

How to do Portfolio manager field will allow users to explicitly define who the responsible Portfolio Manager is for a particular demand.