How are you using Project Tasks?

[sonja1]

I'm very interested to learn how other organizations are using Project Tasks.  

I would like to hear from everyone to know whether they are:

• maintaining the overall project plan completely within ServiceNow, or
• managing a select subset of tasks in ServiceNow

Thanks!

[Uncle Rob]

In the instances where I was using SN PPM, there was almost always conflict between the different roles on how much to use SN.   Generally the PMO office wanted to use SN to store the highly level project statuses.   The more operational task executors wanted granular tasks.   I generally favored the latter, mostly for telling a more nuanced story of work, because for all the supposed discipline about resource planning, nobody could show "where the rubber met the road" on actual work being done.

Spend your time working your project tasks (and submitting status over email via Excel, or logging into some over-engineered dedicated PM solution) and someone asks you why incidents aren't being handled, or why requests are taking longer than expected.   Spend time keeping request throughput high and now the PMO is breathing down your neck for missed Project Task deadlines.

Where do I manage my work?   Everywhere, but especially email.

[sonja1]

Thanks!   I'm wondering: do task assignees in your company primarily use ServiceNow as their primary source for their work queue - or do they also get work assignments from elsewhere?  

I'm not sure I can tell who won the tug of war of more vs less detail shown through project tasks .. was there a victor?  

[kellykaufmann]

We're on Fuji & are exclusively using SN for project tasks - no more external MS Project, Excel schedule etc. Each team has their own control over how detailed a schedule needs to be for a given project, and we're not big enough for project audits, PMO breathing down necks, etc. At my current organization, their processes aren't at the maturity level yet to have formal status reporting on projects. Baby steps!

We're working toward where all tasks for I.T. are identified, assigned, and managed in SN and using VTB's for organization & discussions on priorities w/managers etc. Which is one of the selling points of SN after all - for I.T., not having to look in 5 systems for everything you're supposed to be working on, for managers to have transparency into what % of time their teams are spending on planned project tasks vs incidents etc.

[sonja1]

Thanks Kelly!   I am curious - even without formal PMO audits, because some project plans are quite involved, are the PMs keeping all of their tasks in there as well?  

I ask as there are some large projects that can have over 100 tasks (coordinations, etc), but maybe only 25 - 30 tasks that are assignable to IT directly. It seems that this sort of information would need to still be kept somewhere(?), and it's still a bit painful to modify a project plan in the system.

Thoughts?