With the new Paris release coming out soon, it's that time to start learning what new features, enhancements, and changes are coming to the ServiceNow PPM world. Several exciting new features are coming to Demand, Resource, and Project Management. The Paris release is already available on the developer instance (PDI), so feel free to explore all these new features.
This post will provide an overview of some of those new features, enhancements, and changes for the Paris release.
The complete list can be found here.
New Features and Major Enhancements
Creating new Artifacts from Demand.
The most exciting new feature to come to Demand is creating work items in Scrum and SAFe entities such as a story, epic, or feature from your Demand so that you can execute your demands using Agile methodologies. You are not longer restricted to creating just Projects, Enhancements, Defects, and Changes. You can now create and link the Demand to Agile 2.0 Epics, Agile 2.0 Stories, SAFe Stories, SAFe Epics, and SAFe Features. Please note to see the new choices; you will need to have the SAFe and Agile 2.0 plugins turned on.
While we are on the Type field, there is another new type called "No Conversion," which is an important one. Use this option if you want the Demand to fund a large project that includes one or more projects, epic, or programs. This ties into the new Allocate Fund feature I talk about below.
Predictive Intelligence for Demand and Project
Predictive Intelligence has finally come to Demand! This new feature helps screen for duplicate Demands by displaying similar Demands already in this system when creating a new Demand. It also shows previous demands submitted in the past to help plan the new Demand being created. This new feature will improve your database's quality and help streamline the planning time for a Demand. This is available with activation of the Predictive Intelligence for PPM plugin (com.snc.ppm_ml)
Here is a Setup Guide for Predictive Intelligence for PPM.
This new enhancement allows for a Demand with a Lage multi-year investment to be used as an approved demand to fund one or more projects, epics, or programs from the Demand directly. Please note you need to have the Investment Funding plugin turned on for this new enhancement.
This is one of the new enhancements I am very thrilled about it. I have seen some of you guys in the community asking for this as well. You can finally move a Project task's Planned start date earlier than the Project's Planned start date!! There are two conditions to this.
- Pre-dating a task's planned start date also moves the Project's planned start date.
- The start date of a child task cannot be moved prior to the parent task's start date. For example, if a parent task with a start no earlier than constraint starts on the 20th and the child task starts on the 30th, the start date of the child task can only be moved up to the 20th.
Another enhancement that makes me HAPPY, and some of you will be as well. You can finally add multiple templates to a project. Now you can add additional tasks templates to a schedule after a template has been applied. The additional task from the template will now be added to the end of the last task.
- Finally, an update to the Project Status Report includes some things that some customers have been requesting! Project Status Report will finally include Risk, Issue, Actions, and Request Changes records (RIDAC). Each one will have its section and will also include the following fields -
- Assigned to
- Due date
- Approval
Approved start date and Approved end date
Paris will introduce two new fields in the Project form, Approved start date and Approved end date. They will track the Start and End dates from a Demand. The project schedule is not applied to these dates, and the date remains unchanged when you add project tasks to your Project. Please note that the Planned start and end date are still in the system and can be used. For any new instance not upgrading to Paris, the Project form will NOT have the planned start or end date on the form OOTB. You will have to add them to the form.
Paris will introduce two new task dependencies types - "Start no earlier than" and "Start no later than."
Scheduling conflicts between tasks
A new icon to help identify conflicts between tasks has been introduced on the planning console in Paris. You no longer have to scroll through all the tasks to check if task conflict; they are now identifiable with the new icon.
Compare schedule baselines of a project
New columns have been added to the planning console when comparing schedule baselines. The following columns have been added to the Planning Console for viewing and comparing schedule baseline details:
-
- Baseline start date
- Baseline end date
- Baseline variance
- Import project tasks for multiple projects from different file types, such as an import set or transform maps. This new feature is HUGE! As many of you know, the tedious process to import them manually.
- You can now import a Microsoft Project file to your ServiceNow instance from the Planning Console.
- You can also select the calculation method for calculating project dates when importing a project (manual or automatic).
- You can now also Export the project data, including sub-projects and project tasks in MPP, XML, and CSV format from the Planning Console.
Resource Management also got some much-needed attention in Paris. Many new features and enchantments that many of you in the community have asked for and ServiceNow delivered. Many of the New features are centered around the functionality of the Allocation Workbench.
You can now do the following from the Allocation Workbench -
- Confirm or allocate users for a specific time period
- Replace one user's allocation with another user
- Shift allocations of a user to a future date
- Retain the resource plan state, booked resources, and planned daily contour when you move a project
- Move a resource plan and its allocations to a future date.
In addition to the Allocation Workbench upgrades, you can also Track the actual effort and actual cost of resources through operational resource plans.
New features have been added to Scenario Planning. Some of the new features you guys have been asking for and will help out with planning in ways you could not before. Hopefully, they bring a smile to your face 🙂
With Paris, you can create multiple planning scenarios and combine different combinations of Demands and Projects in a Portfolio. With those newly build planning scenarios, you can now compare them to each other. Making it easier to do a "what-if" evaluation across different scenarios. Once a new scenario has been chosen, you can now confirm it or override an existing one. Making it easier to adjust Portfolio planning based on changing world events, like the COVID pandemic.
Changes in this release
Here are some notable highlights of import changes. For the full list of changes, please visit here.
Project
- As noted above, the Planned start and end dates are no longer available on the Project form OOTB for any new instance of ServiceNow starting in Paris. All other upgrades will still be on the form.
- The new field Approved Start and End Dates will now be on the Project Forms.
- A new Read-Only date field has been added to the Project form called "Constraint date." That field is to help you better understand how the start date is calculated for project tasks. For example, the date in this field is used to calculate the start date for tasks with the Start ASAP constraint.
- You can now choose what RIDAC shows up in the Project Status Report. There is a new checkbox field added: "Show on project status report."
- The Constraint Type and Constraint Date have been added to the Planning Console for viewing and changing the constraint type and date of a task.
Resource Management
- Capacity and availability for terminated resources are automatically updated to 0 when you run the Capacity Termination Handler job if the termination date is earlier than the date on which the job is run. If these resources are booked for a time period beyond their termination dates, those bookings are also updated to 0 in the resource plan.
- In the application navigator, Project Financials has been renamed Financial Planning.
Deprecations
- The Portfolio workbench for portfolio planning, including the Workbench module and the Portfolio Workbench related link, has been deprecated for new customers.
Feel free to bookmark this post or mark it helpful, and if you think I've missed something, please let me know so I can get it added.
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