Demand Ranking approaches

[kellykaufmann]

How are you all leveraging ServiceNow to rank requested projects (Demands, for those of you in Eureka))? Are you just exporting the requested projects into Excel and ranking via a spreadsheet and then manually entering a rank into a ranking field? Are you using the Task Boards in Eureka? Other approaches?

In my last blog post, I noted that our implementation consultants (AOS) configured the Task Boards (which are typically used to rank stories to be scrummed) and made it so we could use the drag-n-drop feature to rank Demands. They also created several Task Boards so ranking can be done different ways — by Business Division (so each business division leader can rank their business division's Demands), by Priority (puts the focus on the top priority Demands to rank), and overall. Ranking is as easy as grabbing a 'card' and sliding it up or down, and the ranking number will be automatically updated. Cool! I'm still working on what content should be displayed on each of the cards, and am thinking of doing a ranking # by business division and an overall ranking #.

Would love to hear your process!

[Lisa_Manchester]

I'm not sure I follow what you are doing. We are in between processes right now. We were doing ranking in Excel by using business goals to score each demand across several goals and then add up the score for each demand. We did not transfer that scoring into Demand Management. Our biggest issue is who does the scoring. We were bringing together all of the stakeholders and having them score everything together. That worked on some level, because everyone had visibility and input. But, the fact is, things were scored pretty closely together; there wasn't that much differentiation. We would like to have each line of business do their own scoring but, we know the scoring will be different, so it won't be "fair" to compare things across LOBs when prioritizing. It is currently a catch-22. I would love to hear more about how others are doing it. Thanks, Kelly, a very relevant topic!

[kellykaufmann]

My apologies Lisa for not being clear. We're trying to rank our top 20 or so Demands - literally Demand #1, Demand #2, etc. that Business wants I.T. to focus on. They will take into consideration the drivers, ROI, etc. Once we get Resource Management set up, we'll take this ranking and figure out a plan of when to do each of those Demands/Projects/Stories, knowing another conversation may be needed with leadership to shuffle projects/stories based on resource availability.

It sounds like the scores you are creating can be done via questions on a survey in Demand in the Eureka version that produce scores that are plotted on the Bubble Chart in the Eureka version (or just reviewed) - will you keep using Excel or will you move toward surveys you think? For now, we are just capturing the info but will move to surveys once we launch ServiceNow to the organization. Next week we're meeting for a few hours to take a look again at our criteria, calculations, etc. since we had the same problem that everything scored pretty closely together   We're also going to take a look at what our long-term process should be for involvement in reviewing the Demands, gathering additional info on the Demands from Business, what triggers progressing the Demand to the 'Qualified' state and who should be able to do that, etc.

Have you considered 2 rankings like we're considering - a ranking by LOB that is done by each LOB lead, and then an overall ranking that is created in collaboration of the leaders across all LOB's? The overall ranking is probably what would drive which projects we'll work on when.

[toneyvecchio1]

Kelly, did you ever get a way to derive the rank # outside of the Task Board / Context Rank.

I tried hijacking the functions used in Stories and get a rankable interface but our stakeholders want the "rank #' on the demand / project form as applicable. We could give them a free # but you can imagine how painful it would be to reorder.

[kellykaufmann]

Hi Toney Vecchio

Actually..just today we handed off to our implementation consultants AOS to implement having the rank number be set by the VTB's card order, and have that ranking number pull onto the Demand form. Below are our high-level requirements for this, for them to think about next week. We're getting detailed requirements together on Mon 6/22 and will communicate to them on Tue 6/23 for them to start development. Once it's finished, we'll have them share the code on ServiceNow Share.

This is the best solution we could come up with and is super user friendly. The only alternative we could find was having the freeform number on the Demand form, ranking & re-ranking in Excel and having Excel automatically re-order everything, and then importing the updated numbers into SN.

Requirement	Notes
Set up functionality to be able to do 'overall rank' & 'business area rank' via VTB's, where vertically moving a card will renumber that card in relation to the other cards on that VTB. 'Overall' and the 'Business Area' VTB's will have 2 swim lanes. Each ranking category should have it's own VTB. - The VTB filters should be of Demands:	Create a business rule to keep the sequence number of a vtb card in sync with the appropriate rank field on the appropriate demand record. Added requirement 1/2. Discussed Thu 1/8.
Have the Demand form pull the ranking # from the visual task board into the ranking # fields. Make this read-only on the Demand form.	Will have 2 rankings: Overall & by business area