Demand: Approved vs. Completed

[toneyvecchio1]

Wanted to ask a question about how your company uses/plans to use Approved vs. Completed in the Demand module?

Here is a scenario with simple dates to keep discussion quick:

Jan 1st - PMO decides a demand is a project that we will work on in the future - Time frame needs to be figured out.

Jan 15th - PMO Discusses with Project Manager who will own it, hand off of ownership occurs. Decided they will start in March.

March 1st - Project formally starts

June 1st - Project formally ends

My Question to the team is, when do you think the demand goes to approved and when does the demand go to completed?

In our company, we are doing:

Jan 1st - Demand Approved

Jan 15th - Demand Completed

In your view, is it the same? Does demand stay open until the Project is closed? Does the demand not get approved until the Project is handed off to PM or even when the Project is ready to start?

[kellykaufmann]

For us, projects are likely to get reshuffled even after they start. So if a new Demand comes in and it's high priority & must happen right away, we say - OK what project will we take off the list since we have finite resources? So we decide on an in-flight project to put on hold and re-open the Demand for that project (because all our projects start from Demand, so they are tied together) to be re-ranked with all the others. For that reason, we wouldn't mark a demand as 'Completed' /   'close' a Demand until the project is completed.

Regarding the question "Does the demand not get approved until the Project is handed off to PM or even when the Project is ready to start?" > For us, the Demand gets 'approved' & ranked by leadership, we agree on a start date considering all the other projects, and we don't actually convert the Demand to a Project until the Project is ready to begin (again because it may get shuffled again before it's scheduled to begin). Then we mark in the Demand a status of 'project started'.

Curious to see the processes of others!

[priyanka_upadhy]

Hi Toney,

I am a Sr. Program manager for ServiceNow and use the demand and project tools internally to manage our project pipeline. Just to share some ideas - here's what we are doing now - Demands are created and submitted, go through an approval process, and finally get approved (or not). We have instructed project managers (or whoever is playing that role in our department) that they should not create a project or start any requirements or design work unless and until the demand is approved via the established business process. For each approved demand, we create a new project. demand stays open till the project is open. When the project is closed, we manually close the associated demand as well. I hope this helps you in your organization in terms of some ideas around the business process for demand and project!

[unigrpmm]

Has anyone done an automated close of "Demand"?   We have Demand creating Stories or Projects and we want to automate the closure of the Demand when the Story or Project closes.   I'm not sure Demands can be closed in an automated way.....        

[toneyvecchio1]

Hi Miriam - Yes this is ultimately what we did.

Double check the values for state and that your demand form uses the project reference field (I think it was introduced in Fuji).

I made a Scheduled Job that uses a Script, runs every 8 hours to close the Projects. I am not sure how you joined Demand and Stories (Maybe you meant enhancements?) but the same idea could apply.

var getDmn = new GlideRecord('dmn_demand');
getDmn.addQuery('state', '8');
getDmn.addQuery('project.state','3');


getDmn.query();
while(getDmn.next()) {

   getDmn.state = '9';
   getDmn.work_notes = 'Demand automatically closed due to Project closure.';

   getDmn.update();
}