In the last blog we looked at the growing popularity of hybrid approaches – ways of delivering work that combine aspects of traditional, plan-driven project management with elements of agile. Hybrid provides project managers and teams with greater freedom to adjust how they work to the needs of each initiative, and avoids the forcing of work into a process structure that may not be best suited to all work items.
The challenge with any approach that embraces flexibility over structure is the greater complexity in tracking and managing that work, and this challenge is proving a barrier for some organizations. They are reluctant to adopt hybrid methods if it results in a loss of control or visibility. ServiceNow helps organizations avoid that problem.
Our Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) solution supports the entire strategic lifecycle. From the development and communication of strategies, goals, and objectives, to the management of benefits based on meaningful metrics, it offers organizations the ability to plan, manage, and deliver entire strategic portfolios. A key part of that is the ability to allow teams to deliver work in whatever method they want.
SPM doesn’t prescribe a particular approach, rather it integrates with whichever combination of work management tools and approaches teams are using. Performance data can be imported and consolidated from plan-driven or agile tools, then presented to stakeholders in the context of the strategic portfolio. This focus is based on value metrics – information that provides insight into whether work is on track to achieve business outcomes. This is in stark contrast to the execution-based metrics like velocity or percent complete that so many organizations rely on, and that are a barrier to the adoption of hybrid work methods.
A focus on value delivery is also the driver behind hybrid adoption – moving away from standard methods that make it easy to measure tactical execution metrics (and hard to measure anything else), in favor of adaptive approaches that better align with optimized ability to achieve business benefits. With SPM, teams understand how their work directly contributes to the strategic priorities of the business, and naturally want to align their work with the successful completion of those priorities.
We also find SPM is an enabler of organizational agility. It makes it easier and faster to analyze different scenarios and approve adjustments to plans when circumstances change. Hybrid work methods make it easier for teams to embrace and implement those changes, minimizing disruption by encouraging flexibility and adaptability in every aspect of how work gets delivered.
That doesn’t mean that agile and plan-driven approaches are dead or dying. There are still plenty of scenarios where each of those approaches is appropriate, and SPM seamlessly supports them both in combination with hybrid. Success ultimately comes from the ability for all teams to work how they want, and SPM is there to make that easier.
For business leaders, it offers the ability to plan, fund, model and adjust seamlessly while communicating in an intuitive and easy to understand way. For work teams, it allows everyone to work in the way that best suits them without sacrificing visibility and control. And for everyone, it offers a single solution to manage all aspects of the strategic lifecycle.
