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

Sandra Clendon
Mega Guru

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?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Carina Hatfield
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

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.

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Jon Miller1
Kilo Guru

Thanks for the insight, Sandra. It certainly sounds promising if ServiceNow is developing this area more. It is a gap that we struggle with (the relationship between SDLC and the CMDB when it comes to Change).

But I'm not sure I agree that it's a 1:1 relationship. Maybe it is if you're developing your own applications. But if, like us, you mostly use off-the-shelf packages, I think it's the 1:many that you originally suggested.

Take SAP as a big, obvious example (sorry if you're not an SAP shop... this may not make sense). SAP ECC is the Business Application but there are multiple modules within that (SD, MM, etc.) which I would see as products and SDLC components. That would align perfectly to how we manage change to SAP ECC, per module.

Jon