One of the biggest challenges that organizations face when completing work – projects, epics, and so on – is ensuring that their teams understand why that work is being done. It’s not enough to tell them that they’re working on a new product to gain market share, or that the system they’re developing will improve operational efficiency. To make the best decisions, and deliver the best solutions, teams need to understand how those solutions are going to contribute to the business and what they need to enable in production environments.
That’s why it’s so important to tie the work being done back to the strategic priorities that are driving work. It’s also why it’s essential that there are clearly defined and agreed to target metrics that need to be achieved. Only when project managers and teams have that understanding of how the work is connected to the business value stream, and how that translates into strategic success, can the best choices be made during execution and delivery.
The benefits of strategic portfolio management
Effective strategic portfolio management (SPM) processes and solutions make it much easier to understand the why. Using visual tools like roadmaps, organizations can directly connect their strategic priorities to key investments and the work items that will execute on those investments. Teams not only understand how their work connects to strategy, but they are also able to see the complete picture of all the work being done in the various programs, products, or other investment vehicles and then gain insight into what is expected of them.
With ServiceNow® Strategic Portfolio Mangement (SPM), customers are able to go even further. The Now Platform®, connecting everything together, allows teams and managers to see what’s needed, and what’s happening across all work types – traditional waterfall projects, Agile epics, hybrid initiatives, etc. There are no gaps in understanding by work teams, and they have complete visibility into all dependencies, expectations, and variances from plan.
Make better decisions
For managers and stakeholders there is always a complete contextualized understanding of performance against expectations, giving the ability to make better decisions, in less time and with greater confidence. When work items need to change and evolve, the impact of those changes can be modeled and understood – minimizing disruption and smoothing the change implementation process.
Ultimately, organizations succeed when their people are able to focus on completing the right work, in the right way, to achieve the right results. This requires information – the ‘what’ of the work that needs to be done. But it also requires insight – the ‘why’. With ServiceNow’s Now platform you get all of the data, generating the information and ensuring that what is required is understood. But with ServiceNow SPM, you also allow people at all levels to gain insight into the why. This gives them the confidence to deliver solutions that enable greater levels of performance than would otherwise be possible.
You can read the other posts in this series on how SPM aligns your strategic goals with blogs #1 and #2.
