ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the most robust tool I have ever used in my 18+ years of project management. The possibilities for a customer are endless in that PPM can help manage projects from Idea through Close; or anything in between. With very little, or no, customization, the project manager can align PPM to fit the culture of their organization for optimal project management.
What I hope to do in this series of blogs is to walk through different scenarios where you can see the value of the PPM module and either enhance your own project management skills or grab onto something to promote to your customer. But before we start learning PPM, we will take a look at what Project Management is.
What is a Project?
Before we can manage something, we have to know what it is. ServiceNow identifies a project as "any planned, collaborative effort that is designed to achieve an objective."
The Project Management Institute (PMI) states some traits of a project:
- Temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time; defined scope, budget, and resources
- Unique in that it is not a set of predefined, routine operations; developing and implementing software are two types of project
Projects can be large encompassing multiple project teams around the world; projects can be as small as changing the fields on a form. There are two typical methods for managing these projects: the Waterfall process which follows a sequential, linear process consisting of discrete phases and the Agile process which is an iterative approach to planning and guiding the project in small sections called Sprints. But then there is a method that I use quite often with ServiceNow and that is a hybrid of Waterfall and Agile. Whichever method works best for you or your customer is the one to use. And that brings me to the next area of definition: Project Management.
What is Project Management?
So we have seen that there are different methods of project management, but we still don't know too much about what the purpose of project management is. PMI states that Project Management is "the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements." The goals of project management are to produce a product that is not only completed, but is acceptable to the customer. I learned many years ago that Success = Quality - Customer Perception. You can have the best product delivered on time and within budget, but if the customer perceives that the project did not go well, then CSAT scores can drop. That is why Project Management is so important/
ServiceNow and PMI are similar in their approach to rolling out projects. The phases for ServiceNow are:
- Initiating - Define the project
- Planning - create the project schedule, make resource assignments, create baselines, and view the critical path
- Executing - This is where you determine which method to use: Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid
- Delivering - getting the work done and tracking progress
- Closing - Go Live completed, documentation handed over, Retrospective scheduled and Lessons Learned stored
PMI phases are the same except for Delivering which is called Monitoring and Controlling. But they all have the same idea for managing the project. PPM enables us to track the project from Initiating so that we can create status reports and visualizations to update not only the customer, but also internal leadership. Creating a dashboard for Active Projects, Tasks, and Go Live dates is a way that ServiceNow provided visibility to the projects in a quick, customizable manner.
We have seen a high level view of what a Project is, how it can be managed, and now we will look at the person responsible for the success of that project: the Project Manager.
What is a Project Manager (PM)?
Project Managers are agents of change. They take the goals from the projects and make them their own. They work well under pressure and are completely at ease delivering bad news as well as good news. While letting their Emotional Intelligence shine.
No, Project Managers are not angels sent to us by ServiceNow heaven. They are real people who use a certain set of skills that enable developers, C level leaders, and auditors to breathe easy. A project manager works with the Sales team to know what projects are in the pipeline and which ones are awaiting SOW signature so that they can align the project team. They work with the Operations team to staff the resources for each project according to the skill set needed.
For Waterfall managed projects, Project Managers use project plans that give an outline of tasks, assignees, dependencies, and other important project information. Most PMs either currently use Microsoft Project or have in the past. You can also use Smartsheet or even Excel; these are a little more work, but you can get the same structure. Each task is detailed enough to know what is being worked on and provides a start and end date as well as a duration. Each task feeds time and percent complete up to the parent task as illustrated in the diagram below:
As you can see from this view, there is a gantt chart depicting a timeline for task completion. There are many different views for project plans including project costing options. You will be happy to know that a project plan is included in PPM and is very easy to use.
I feel like I have just touched the surface of project management in PPM and I have. There is so much good content to come, I hope that you will follow this blog so that you don't miss Part 2: Components of PPM
Happy Project Managing!
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