Does a Project always need to start as a Demand?

[natashahunter]

I am not new to Project Mgmt, but new to ServiceNow PPS as of the past year.   I am trying to understand if it is recommended as a best practice to always have a Demand precipitate a Project?   We are doing rollout/expansion of PPS and are having to "catch-up" to get some data loaded since we already have many projects in flight - so not sure if we should be going through the exercise of loading as a Demand and then promoting to a Project to track the maturation of the Demand.   Since there is a bit of a culture shift (introduction of capturing Demands and assessing them to determine if they actually move on to become Projects) I want to make sure that we are not falling back into bad habits and using the system appropriately by NOT just starting at the point of creating a Project if that is not the intention.   I can provide more context if needed, but just wanted to get a pulse of thoughts out there and hope that this all makes sense.  

[sachin_namjoshi]

Hi Natasha,

Its not necessary to always create project from demand.

But, its certainly best practice to create project from demand since doing this will copy over demand attributes ( cost plans, cost plan breakdowns and resource plans) this will help you to capture financial information for project which is created from demand.This will also help you in reporting on PA dashboards, workbench to determine health of your portfolio which may contain one or many projects.

In your case, since you want to import historical data of projects in Servicenow PPS,   i will recommend to create one time data source, transform map which will migrate your project data in service now PPS tables.

You can always create user guides in service now for your end users to educate them in service now PPS implementation.

Regards,

Sachin

[woobie]

I do not think you need to create a demand for any existing, in-flight projects. There is no system limitation that requires a demand for each project, and at this point if the projects are already in place in another tool, it would seem that you are past the point of needing to justify demand. I can't see a best practice need to create demand records for projects already in flight. Maybe someone else will have a different take on this? In my environment, a demand is created and managed for any net new project request. If we were to import in-flight projects from another source, we would not create demand records for those projects, unless we wanted/needed to go through the approval process for that project. That's my 2 cents, lets see if anyone disagrees...

[Dave Smith1]

As others have said: a project doesn't necessarily need to begin with a Demand.

A Demand essentially follows the first few steps in creating an RFC (see: Change Management) and may - at some point - be "promoted" to a project.  

However, Demands are change drivers; there may already have been these steps (gathering business requirements, analysing then chartering the project) outside of the Demand process, so can jump straight to the project stage.

[woobie]

Yahoo, looks like the ServiceNow employee agrees with me! #Feelsgoodbro