How do you generate a business case?

[kristytupper]

I was just in a Webinar on the future of PPM and they showed a lot of things on Demand Management that I've never seen (and we are running Jakarta).   One thing they showed was a business case generated automatically from a demand record.   In searching the documentation (docs.servicenow.com), I see nothing that refers to this - yet I asked the question and was told that everything they showed was OOB in Jakarta.   Where is the function to auto generate a business case?

[Sean Witt]

Hi Kristy.

I looked at a Jakarta Personal Development Instance which was OOB (other than activating the Project Portfolio Suite with Financials plugin). In that environment, I see a "Business case" field on the Assessment Data form section for the demand.

If I enter text there, work the demand through the state flow, and create a project from the demand, the system is automatically copying the business case entry from the demand to the new project. But the business case field isn't displayed OOB on the project form. So to make it visible, you would need to configure the project form to display it. But the database column is existing and OOB, so as soon as you pull it onto the form, you should have what you want.

The images below show the OOB placement on the demand form, and the data where it lands in the project record (from the list view since I don't have the field on the form). So I would agree with your assessment that if the person driving your demo was showing business case on the project form, then they weren't showing a 100% OOB form.But it wouldn't take much work to get it on the form since the database column is already there...  

Sean

[kristytupper]

Thanks so much, Sean.   We actually have that field on the Demand itself - what they showed in the demo was auto generation of a business case report-type document (not a report, but something you might use, say, for the first stage gate to get a project initially approved).   It was laid out similar to the portfolio status that you can auto generate, and it included all the demand fields (ROI, expenses, resources, justification, etc.).   It was billed as "right now, people cut and paste this info into a PPT, but now you can just generate it from ServiceNow."   Have you heard of that?

[Sean Witt]

No problem Kristy...

We had someone from ServiceNow Professional Services do a presentation earlier this year (maybe at a User Group meeting?) that sounds similar to what you are describing, but this guy was clear that what he was showing was NOT OOB functionality.

I'll look back at my notes and ask around a little bit, and will let you know if I find anything. But if I am remembering the same feature that you are describing, it wasn't OOB at that time (the demo I saw was in Istanbul).  

Sean

[kristytupper]

Interesting - and good to know.   Thanks for digging around for us - I really appreciate it.