Demand Management: Strategic vs Operational

[Randy Borges]

Hi @Namita Mishra,

We have been using ServiceNow Demand and Portfolio Management and are interested in understanding how other institutions are using the two categories within Demands. 

Currently you have two options. Strategic and Operational. I have found in testing that you are not able to create projects from Operational Demands which leads me to one of my questions.

What is the purpose using the Operational category? Is it to actually perform the work within the Demand? Who is managing that demand?

Lastly, once demands is created, it automatically populates as Strategic and those are the only ones that allow for the creation of a project. I have done a lot of research on this and this forum appears to be the place that may have the answers. Looking for clarification from anyone who can help shed some light on this topic.

Thanks,

Randy Borges

[Jon Miller1 · Accepted solution]

I don't like this part of the ServiceNow design, Randy. It precludes the ability to work on a project that is operational in nature. In the real world, a "project" is a mechanism for getting work done. It is not exclusively for "strategic" work. We actually found the two "Operational" types (Change and Defect) were actually causing confusion. We had a lot of departments that insisted they had to enter Demand of type Change for a CR resulting from a project! We ended up disabling "Operational" (i.e. a user can only select category "Strategic") and have, therefore, limited demand to type "Project" and type "Enhancement". We tend not to put "break-fix" through demand management anyway so type "defect" was a little redundant. We never found a sufficient use-case to support type "change". Why go through demand management just for a server reboot?!

I could live with "defect" and "change" for the occasional exception. But what would make sense is to support Strategic-Project and Operational-Project.

Jon

[Randy Borges]

I couldnt agree more Jon. We actually inquired about have Strategic vs Non-Strategic projects. That would align with your though process of Strategic vs Operational type of Projects. Thank you for sharing.

[Randy Borges]

Hi Jon, did you ever implement Strategic-Project and Operational-Project.? I am curious as this would be something that I would be interested in sharing with our internal ServiceNow developers.

[Jon Miller1]

We did not, Randy. We just create all demand for projects as Strategic-Project, regardless of whether they're strategic or operational.

[Stephanie33]

Yes, our users are very confused by this, as well. We are currently using all of the possible OOTB demand types, but have found the Operational Change category quite burdensome. What we have discovered is a need to create more Catalog Request items for those routine tasks like server reboots, etc. Why qualify as a demand?? The work needs to be done, it's just a matter of logging the activity. Better to do that via a Request/CHG.