PPM Blog Intro, 'where we stand'

[kellykaufmann]

This will be the first of what I hope to be a weekly blog. This will be an honest reflection of my current journey to set up another IT PMO while also kicking off the implementation of ServiceNow at my current employer. Feel free to comment with suggestions based on your experience, with questions, etc. This is a journey many of you have been on before or will be experiencing soon, so let's learn from each-other!

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I was hired at my employer (a distribution company) mid-April 2014 to run IT projects and help get an IT PMO off the ground. I was to jump in to PM a few in-flight projects and kick off a few projects, the largest on my list being the ServiceNow (SN) implementation project. This is actually my second go-around with implementing ServiceNow at the same time as setting up an IT PMO — I did the same at my last employer (a hospital) and I found that syncing the two works great, just as re-assessing the structure & processes of the Help Desk is a natural activity when setting up Incident Management in SN. The difference is we will be starting fresh with PM processes, tools, etc so it is a clean slate, which makes it much easier to make sure the best-in-practice processes & tools are selected.   I find setting up PMO's fun — finding the right level of rigor, the right tools, etc for the size & type of organization. Some people find that crazy. That's fine — I have no shame in enjoying this!

Since this SIG is about SN's PPM tools, I really wanted this blog to focus exclusively on setting up SN's PPM functionality while setting up an IT PMO. But since I'm co-running the entire SN implementation project with our implementation consultants while also leading getting our SN PPM tools set up while also setting up our IT PMO while also running other IT projects — and I know many of you will be in the exact same circumstance of also leading or co-leading the entire SN project - it just makes sense to include the 'whole story'. Let's dig in.

Here's where we stand:

Our IT department has a relative sense of awareness of our upcoming ServiceNow (SN) project — our SVP of IT formally communicated the project a few times, and sent an email to the IT department formally announcing the initiation of planning for the project, which will begin next week (woohoo!).

Three of us went to the Knowledge 14 conference in May: myself, our SN admin, and one of the IT directors. Our SN admin attended admin training while there — she's new to SN so we want her to have the training needed to be successful in this new role, which will take up 50% of her time going forward. The director & I did the "divide & conquer" approach to get as much familiarity as possible on the different SN modules that we will implement over time, and for me to get as much tips & 'lessons learned' as possible from other implementations.

Our SN version is Dublin. But just this week I had a conversations with SN and we agreed that it makes sense for my employer to participate in the Controlled Availability (CA) for the Eureka version of SN. The timing will be perfect — the same time we should be ending SN Phase 1 planning, we should be given the blessing to get on Eureka. The problem is we only have two SN instances. We need to put Eureka on a third instance. Note to self: I need to figure this out.

Another task for me: We don't like the web addresses for our instances (we want to remove the word 'prod' from the web address for our prod instance, and our dev instance for some reason says 'testdev' in the web address and this is redundant). Our consultants directed me to the site to put in a request with SN to change the web address (apparently our consultants can't request it until we sign with them for the implementation piece).This isn't extremely important honestly. If SN can figure this out easily, great. If not, we'll move on and emotionally accept the names of these instances.

Other details (these q's were asked to pretty much every PPM presenter at the SN Knowledge 14 conference, so I promised myself to give this info up-front & save readers the time from asking!) (another note: I've been at this company just a few weeks....I may have to return & fix this information!):

·           Implementation partner: AOS

·           Size of help desk: about 20 people

·           Size of IT department: About 100 people

·           Size of the organization impacted by this project: 3,400 employees

·           Team thus far: myself as PM, our SN Admin, 7 IT Directors, and our AOS consultants

What's coming up:

I scheduled a series of planning sessions in two weeks with AOS and our team (more details will be in the next blog post), and then a read-out meeting from AOS to our group of our plan/timeline two weeks after that.

I gave the instance links & login info to the IT directors, as well as a link to these intro videos, the link to SN's Wiki page listing each module, and the SN Community Forum. Some of the directors have been playing around in our instance so they are better prepared for the planning sessions.

What's keeping me up at night (already):

Two things. First, I despise planning events. For some reason, I can create & keep track of several thousand-line project schedules, but godforbid I have to plan an event because suddenly things get more complicated than necessary and . I'm spending a lot of time finding a room for our day of discussions on Incident Management & Problem Management for our Planning sessions, because a lot of people from different areas need to participate in the meeting. Let me be more specific: I'm having a hard time finding an inexpensive room, that will fit >14 people, allows food & drinks, has a projector & screen, and has a speakerphone. Apparently that combination is impossible near us, as one of the criteria will not be met no matter where we look. Please make this task of finding the perfect location just magically take care of itself.

Second: Because I've been through a SN implementation before, I know there are a ton of decisions that need to be made that will naturally take a lot of time to swirl around. I know we will not have time for all these decisions (or even many of these decisions) in the planning sessions in two weeks. I would really like to get these decisions started. I asked AOS if there are decisions we can get moving on beforehand, but they said no. Do they realize we're starting with a clean slate, not just taking existing practices & putting them in place in SN? I asked again. They said no. They probably want to lay the foundation for these decisions, make sure we have a complete picture when making these decisions, which makes sense. But I know that these dozens of hours of decision making sessions will be logged and I will have to schedule dozens of meetings for after our planning sessions, and considering how swamped everyone is, I'm worried about how long this decision-making process will take so we can get started with setting up SN. Because we are really, really excited and anxious to get to that point!

Wish me luck getting all these Planning sessions properly organized.