How have others managed the relationship between Business Application and Agile Product?

[Sandra Clendon]

Our PMO team has asked us to set up Business Applications so that they can identify which applications are impacted in Ideas, Demands and Projects.  Easy-peasy.

Additionally, we have Agile Products set up to ensure we have up to date product backlogs for products we are managing through Agile.  For example, any given product may have stories that fell out of scope for a previous project, stories logged as technical debt, defects that have arisen but not high enough priority to be resolved or enhancements that have been requested but have had no funding to address.

When an Idea moves into Demand and we start to scope it, we also want to be able to look at the associated product backlogs and see if anything can / should be included in scope - or in fact already has a lot of useful background information that we don't need to rediscover.

So, for us, there is a relationship between Business Applications and Agile Products but I can't see anywhere OOTB that addresses this.  I believe any relationship would naturally be one Business Application to 0-many Agile Products.

How have others done this in such a way that you are naturally prepared for tools like Digital and Application Portfolio Management?

[Jon Miller1]

I think this is already called out in the latest (v4) Common Service Data Model (CSDM), Sandra. But it's a little fuzzy and I suspect that's intentional as ServiceNow have more work to fully flesh it out. It's referred to as "SDLC Component" and, while it doesn't explicitly state this, I believe an SDLC Component could equate to a Product. This enables the relationship you're looking for; 0-to-many Products to one Business Application.

Per the CSDM documentation, an SDLC Component can be instantiated via the "Application" CI Class. As there is already a relationship between Application and Product via the Model ID, that completes the connection from Business Application to SDLC Component (Application) to Product. My guess (and it is just a guess) is that if you follow this approach, you should be in a good place to take full advantage of SDLC Components once ServiceNow define them a little more in the CSDM.

That reminds me, I need to check if there's a v5 CSDM for Tokyo!

[Christian Prob2]

Hi @Sandra Clendon,

interesting and good question! 

The first reaction is that it may be as simple as adding a reference field to Business Apps in the Agile product table - that should give you the 1 - many relationships.

I guess the trickier question would be where and when to display which records so that it makes sense in the flow. 

Unfortunately, I don't have any lessons learned as we are not there yet - but I can totally see that question coming up very soon.

Christian

[Carina Hatfield · Accepted solution]

Thank you Sandra for the question and thank you Jon for the reply.  Jon is correct.  As of Rome, you can reference Business Applications to the Product.  I've shared this with the CSMD as we (SPM) are partnering with them on what we want from a product lifecycle as they work on the v5 of the CSDM.  

But with that said, Application Model can be referenced in many areas OOTB today (Rome+) including but not limited to:

• Ideas
• Demands
• Projects
• Epics
• Stories
• Business Application (CMDB via the Model ID reference)
• SDLC Component (CMDB via the Model ID reference)

If you want to share with us what you are trying to do and your challenges, I'd be happy to discuss.

[Sandra Clendon]

Interesting call out in the SPM: Digital Product Transformation white paper (which you can only access by signing up for the course).  If you are moving to product based development, you should set up a one-to-one relationship between the two.  So, every time you create a Business Application, it should automatically create an Agile Product.  Further, start setting up rules to populate the Business Application (through the Model ID reference) wherever you assign a product to an SDLC component.  Hopefully I've got that right @Carina Hatfield .

From what I can see, at the moment, you have to do some configuration behind the scenes to make it all hang together, but this will likely be resolved in upcoming upgrades.

I guess the question I was really asking was "What IS the perceived relationship between Business Application and Agile Product?" so from this I'm gathering 1:1, that they are pretty much the same thing when you are looking at the agile software development aspect.

Lots of CMDB and SPM research to get to this point - but the white paper appears to hold the answers.