PPM Blog #6 - PPM putting it to work…

[Wesley8]

It has been some time since my last post, and lots have happened. In March, we moved PPM to our PROD environment, and I loaded all our current demands into our PROD instance. During April, our facility activated a large electron health record solution, and PPM was definitely on the back burner.
Our accomplishments over the last several months include:
• We implemented our Service Portal in the London release. We exposed the Ideas through Snow service portal to our users. We created knowledge articles for our Ideas so our clients know what we are looking for. Also we developed a manual process to send new submitted ideas to the demand managers. This process is currently done via email, however we could easily automate this based on workflow in the future. We also evaluated exposing Demand form instead of Ideas, however since our focus has been starting with Ideas, we stayed with this strategy
○ For the first 30 days of Ideas, we have received 18 new ideas and have accepted 15 as viable demands.

• We trained our three earlier adopters. I have attached our Project Lead educational material. I used a template that I found on one of the older ServiceNow ITBM community posts. I hope my modifications are helpful to someone else.

• Our early adopter projects have done well, and we were able to verify our Project Lead education, standard project template, project progress (Status) reporting, and use our new IS Investment Portal to share with all our full IS team.
○ Project template - we are crawling into PPM with one project template. This template has three main phases and three key milestones. Phases are Plan, Execute, Close. Milestones are project start, project plan approved, project go-live, and project after action review.

• We have now trained all our demand/portfolio managers, along with all our project leads.

• We completed one-on-one training with our demand/portfolio managers and small classroom training with our project leads.

• The individual training was an hour with the project leadership class a full two hours.

• I also created PPM ServiceNow KB articles for a project, portfolio, and program leaders. As well, we created an article for our new Demand process. I have attached all our KB articles.

• We have completed our large enterprise project and have all active projects in PPM with Project Leaders working on their high-level project plans. For our initial work, we are keeping all our project plans at a high-level and milestone levels.
○ We had initially thought we should keep our project plans at a milestone level, however during our initial project work, it became obvious that using ServiceNow project tasks was a natural next step. The project managers have to remember that only IS has access to PPM tasks and that non-IS task assignment is handled through other processes. We have projects using O365 Outlook task assignment as well as O365 Microsoft Planner to track non-IS project work.

• We are using PPM as a project-based solution vs. the full Agile 2.0 product based methodology. Someone share the youtube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVUKWR-rnqg for anyone interested.

• We are leveraging Agile 2.0 enhancements more than we had anticipated. The focus that ServiceNow moved Enhancements / Defects into ITBM and the creation of stories for teams provide solutions. I have attached a document for the Agile process we are using.
○ Agile Unified Backlog - We plan to on leveraging the unified backlog capability to pull enhancements into Sprints for teams to manage product enhancements.
○ Agile 2.0 - We have created all the necessary Agile products, Agile groups with two-week sprints, loaded many Enhancements directly into ServiceNow based on product, assignment groups, assigned-to field, and priority. Teams will use unified backlog to pull these enhancements into the appropriate product backlog and plan out the delivery based on products and quarterly release project.

• We have set 7/30 as the end of our initial migration phase and PPM is not our source of truth for all IS project work. During our initial phase, we have focused on validating the following processes
○ Use our PPM Demand process for prioritization for all new projects and work.
○ Project Leads create project plans for all active projects.
○ Use our Investment portal to report weekly progress on our work in process activities.

• We have a Rego PPM post-implementation on-site review planned. I have attached working PPT for that visit.

• Our next goal is to implement the resource planning into our PPM demands and projects. We will complete this in a phased approach and start with estimating resource groups and build up to individual resources.