Using Project Management
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Summary of Using Project Management
The Project Management application in ServiceNow helps you plan, manage, and track projects effectively by organizing tasks, dependencies, resources, and costs. It supports different approaches to project planning and integrates with portfolio and resource management for comprehensive project oversight.
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Planning Your Project
- Tasking Approaches: Choose between top-down and bottom-up tasking. Top-down starts with high-level project phases broken into tasks, suitable for broad estimates but requires caution with task start dates. Bottom-up focuses on detailed task estimates that roll up to parent tasks and phases, offering more precise planning.
- Portfolio Considerations: Assess if your project is part of a larger portfolio and how it relates to other projects or initiatives for better portfolio-level planning and reporting.
- Dependencies and Milestones: Use task dependencies to control task sequencing. Milestones, zero-duration tasks, highlight critical dates and can enforce dependencies to ensure project timing accuracy.
- Baselines: Capture baseline start and end dates to monitor schedule variances visually on the Gantt chart, helping identify and manage delays efficiently.
- Skills and Resources: Ensure that users, groups, and their skills are correctly set up within ServiceNow. Assign tasks to appropriately skilled resources or groups, leveraging the Skills Management and Resource Management applications.
- Related Records: Consider existing incidents, problems, or changes that might justify project creation, especially changes that trigger project activities.
- Cost Tracking: If tracking costs is required, estimate group resource costs upfront and record actual costs via time cards. The Project Management Costing add-on is necessary for detailed cost tracking including Configuration Item (CI) costs.
- Project Goals: Define clear goals for each project. Goals are stored in the Goal table and can be linked to tasks to keep progress aligned and measurable.
Assigning and Managing Resources
Assign individual users or groups to project tasks, managing resource allocation through resource plans in the Resource Management application. This ensures that tasks are staffed appropriately and resource utilization is tracked.
Portfolio Integration
Create portfolios to group related projects, enabling consolidated reporting and management. Portfolios can include related demands, providing a comprehensive view of organizational initiatives and project statuses.
Use Project Management to plan, manage, and track projects effectively.
Plan the project
Before creating a project, consider the following questions and issues:
- Do you want a top-down or bottom-up approach to tasking?
Top-down tasking involves creating a project first, then identifying major project phases. Later on, phases can be broken down into tasks and subtasks. The emphasis is on creating estimates for high-level items such as phases and parent tasks and then building the project down from there toward a more detailed level. Use caution when creating tasks for top-down tasking. Creating a task under a project that has a start-on date later than the start date of the project, the project shifts to the later start date. The Project Management application supports bottom-up tasking better.
Bottom-up tasking involves creating several sets of small tasks and estimating task items such as effort, cost, and duration. These estimations are then aggregated into high-level parent tasks (rollup tasks) and phases. The emphasis is on estimating smaller chunks of work as accurately as possible first, then letting those estimations roll up into parent tasks, phases, and the project itself.
- Is the project part of a larger portfolio of projects?
Also consider portfolio planning and how the project relates to similar projects or initiatives.
- What types of dependencies do the tasks have with other tasks?
The Project Management application supports various dependencies.
- Can milestones and project baselines help manage a project?
A milestone is a project task with a duration of 0. Use milestones to indicate important dates in a project. If necessary, create dependencies between tasks and milestones so that a task does not start until a milestone has been reached.
A baseline is a snapshot of the current planned start and end dates at the time the baseline was created for each task. A line appears under each task on the Gantt chart for the original planned start and end dates. The line appears shifted to the left or right depending on whether the task was started early or late. If tasks slip to later dates, the baseline indicator provides an easy way to see how severe the delays are.
- Have the necessary skills, groups, and resources been created in ServiceNow?
If project tasks are assigned to different groups or individual resources with the required skills, create users and groups and configure the Skills Management application.
- Does an existing incident, problem, or change justify creating a project to track it?
Of these record types, a change is most likely to lead to activities that are tracked as a project.
- Do you want to track project costs?
Estimate group resource costs before starting the project. Then track the actual cost of each user resource from time cards. The Project Management application can also calculate the costs of affected CIs in a project. The Project Management Costing add-on is required to track costs.
- What goals do you want the project to achieve?
Every project has at least one goal. Project goals are saved in the Goal table and can link to any task. In a typical scenario, link one goal to each project and keep the State field of the goal up to date.
Assign resources or assignment groups to the tasks
User resources are the individuals in an organization who are assigned to project tasks. You can manage your resources with resource plans in the Resource Management application.Add the project to a portfolio
A portfolio is a group of related projects. If the project is related to other projects, create a portfolio and add the project. The Project Management application provides a useful portfolio view that makes it easy to report on the status of all projects in a portfolio. Portfolios also include demands.