Companies have to do more with less. More work but with less resources and less budget. But how do companies determine which initiatives to work on and which to resource and fund? There should be a framework that provides a holistic view of Initiatives that align to strategy and deliver value. Once stacked rank, those initiatives are funded and resourced.
With the Q4 2023 store release of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), companies are able to score and rank their initiatives and understand the factors that lead to the ranking ensuring those initiatives that provide value are prioritized. Once prioritized, initiatives are funded and can be baselined to track cost. The financial baselines feature enables organizations to track and compare baselines over time, enabling easy financial tracking and variances. Resourcing the initiative is simple with a new Resource Management Workspace that enables resource managers and project managers to view, edit, and reassign resources to work on those initiatives that align to strategy.
Download these features in the ServiceNow store.
Scoring/Ranking
Product and Portfolio Managers need to systematically score and rank planning items to determine the relative priority of work. They also need to be able to show the factors that were evaluated to determine their rankings in order to achieve consensus across stakeholders.
- Select one of three out-of-the-box frameworks or create a custom framework
- Each portfolio can use a different framework to accommodate different methodologies across the organization
- Use scores to rank items in the portfolio to instantly use the scores to prioritize the entire portfolio
- Use any numeric attribute to quickly rank items rather than dragging-and-dropping
Resource Management Workspace
A dedicated workspace to view all work across all resources in a single pane of glass to effectively and proactively manage resources across the organization.
- A complete view of all work, including both assigned and unassigned work as well as planned and operational work, to truly capture the accurate capacity and workload of an organization
- Quickly and easily navigate between the Project Workspace and the Resource Management Workspace via hyperlinked work items and a consistent user experience
Financial Baselines
Enables organizations to track and compare how project or planning item financials change over time to identify when and where variances on demand or automatically on a fixed schedule
- Create multiple baselines for a project or planning item
- View planned, actuals, and variance for each cost plan
- Compare planned vs actual costs for past time periods and planned vs planned costs for future time periods
Priority-based Capacity Planning
Before: All planning items were shown as at risk when a resource was overallocated
Now:
- Resource requirements will be fulfilled based on the rank of the planning items in the portfolio
- Higher ranking planning items get fulfilled first, followed by lower ranking items.
- Users can now identify exactly which of the planning items are at risk and which can be accomplished based on the color-coded burndown chart on the heatmap.
Read-only Role for SPW/PPW
Previously, customers had to withhold SPW/PPW access from users who should not be able to edit planning items, portfolios, and roadmaps. Now those users can be given a read-only role to allow them to view and collaborate
- New “SPW Read” role provides view-only access to the planning workspace, including Portfolio Plans, Roadmaps, and Free-form Roadmaps
- Read-only users can add notes, comments, or attachments to portfolio plans and roadmaps that are shared with them.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management offers comprehensive planning, execution, and alignment features for end-to-end visibility on your initiatives. By leveraging these new features, organizations can work on what provides the most value while eliminating those that don’t.
For more information, review the release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
To learn more about these features, check out the Strategic Portfolio Management blog.
For more information on Strategic Portfolio Management, visit the product page.
Download these features on the ServiceNow store.
