BLOG post #2 - "NOW on NOW — Using Demand Management at ServiceNow"

[Lisa_Manchester]

How it is going:

Following up on my previous entry, we are still working towards the items below and still dealing with some of the same issues. Here is how it is going…

Need = Prioritize the requests and get them on a timeline to be worked

Issue = Our scoring model did not really differentiate the projects enough, they were still too close together in score.

Update = Last quarter, each Line of Business (LOB) added a relative ordering to their requests. Meaning, the order in which they would want them done. We used this to help put together the roadmap, but it is not our long-term strategy. Ordering defeats the purpose of scoring, really. Good scoring should give order. We would like to work out a set of questions, with scores, that will give Business value score. We have some stuff we've used earlier and we are going to revamp that. The main issue is that scoring is subjective. If each LOB does their own scoring, then you can't use that to compare across LOB, because even though they use the same questions, they may not use the same methodology in their scores. Still working through that.

Issue = We did not have a way for our internal customers, the LOB leaders, to see the roadmap on demand. What if they just wanted to peek in on how things were going? They couldn't.

Update = This quarter, we used the CIO roadmap in the PPM tool to show each LOB what the quarterly roadmap looks like. We can show the whole roadmap or filter it by "Portfolio" which is LOB. They really liked this view and the fact that we were doing it in the tool! However, we still don't have a really good way for each LOB to see the delays, changes, etc. There have been other threads in the community about this same need.

What's next:

We've made some updates to our Demand Management tool, just to customize it for our use. We removed some fields from the default view that we don't use, and we've added a few. We are also working on:

• When projects are created by demand management, we add a default set of milestones to the project.   We are planning to add two additional milestones: Requirements Review and Solution Review
• We will look at populating the "project" field in the demand record with the "top task" number automatically on the project tasks. This has to happen for the project to appear on our project task report we use for the weekly review. It is manually populated now.
  • We will work with our Application Development team to fix the issue that the demand portfolio does not carry over to the project. They do not appear "linked" in a user-friendly way.