When the pandemic hit, the pressure to adapt training offers to ServiceNow grew dramatically. A growing number of customers from the Americas, Europe, India, and Australia want more virtual classes, more scheduling flexibility, and more customization.
Answering key project planning questions in a timely manner has become more difficult for the ServiceNow custom training and adoption team. With rising demand, our team’s resources — spread around the world — need to grow.
To effectively manage custom training projects from start to project closing and review after implementation, we need a common project management approach. We want to answer questions like:
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What projects are in the pipeline?
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What is the capacity of our resource against our future needs?
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How do we see the progress, risks, and issues of a project?
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Can we see our key business metrics in one dashboard?
A standardized approach
We know that a single record system can capture the demand and resource pipeline for delivering customer projects to the team’s global portfolio and help us scale with real-time, centralized reporting. It will also help us provide a consistent customer experience.
Our team has very little project management experience. Although unfamiliar with concepts such as project plans, risk registers, and resource plans, we are very familiar with Now Platform®.
We decided to try Project Portfolio Management (PPM), a ServiceNow solution that provides project, program, portfolio, resource, demand, and timecard management capabilities. It is part of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which helps organizations drive business results by aligning their strategy with their work across different methods and structures. We chose Performance Analytics, another Now Platform solution, to track our progress over time.
Adopting a feature-rich package like PPM can easily surprise us. But we got started with the features we needed directly out of the box.
Project management out of the box
Like many customers, we are keen to avoid long stages of development. We want to reap the benefits of PPM as soon as possible. So, we started with some basic guidelines for adoption:
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Stick to the concept of a minimum viable product. We wanted to keep track of projects and resources and then continue to iterate after our initial move and go-live.
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Stay true to out-of-the-box features and zero customization. This way, the solution can be quickly implemented, easily upgraded with each release, and used by other teams in the future.
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Streamline processes to encourage adoption and simplify reporting. Templates will give us a way to set up standard reports.
3 areas of positive impact
PPM has been a game-changer for our team. This greatly increases our productivity and efficiency and has helped us sharpen our project management skills. Here are three areas where PPM has had a positive impact:
1. Project management
We have dramatically improved how we monitor and manage demands, customer projects, and resource utilization. We can now create and manage a wide range of needs and projects, whether they involve several small tasks or a large portfolio of projects with complex interactions and dependencies.
Monitoring and managing all work from a records system ensures that all project activities are captured and the underlying financial data is immediately available. Separately, it has improved our processes for analyzing credit consumption and pricing. Mobile features are next on our wish list for adoption.
2. Resource management
We allocate our staff more effectively by analyzing workloads and allocating tasks appropriately. Small automations, such as resource plans that autoskip a person’s scheduling during a planned holiday time, make life easier.
Timecards make sure we know where resources are spending their time, and we can compare that to our plan. As our program ages, we also plan to adopt a skills matrix.
3. Real-time reporting
We use dashboards to make smarter investment decisions about training initiatives. Leadership dashboards offer visibility to key business metrics such as project finance. With this information, leaders can plan for the future, create roadmaps, and make informed investment decisions.
Sales lead teams can review customer training portfolios and provide timely and targeted advice. This improves our customer experience and sales pipeline. By combining customer data, we can make smarter decisions about our market offers and price points.
To make the transition as seamless as possible, we have appointed a dedicated change enablement leader to manage stakeholder communications and engagement, and to gather feedback on every step of our implementation.
On-demand training on the Now Learning platform allowed team members to become familiar with PPM early in the process. We also ran a user training process for a variety of personas that included teacher -led sessions and video demos.
The best decision we ever made
More than a year later, our PPM adoption team has been a bigger success than we expected. The implementation of base functionality has greatly improved our understanding of our day-to-day operations. We easily manage scope through our project-deliverable templates, and a project-on-a-page dashboard drives our review process after implementation without effort.
ServiceNow customers choose to invest in their people and processes as part of their digital innovation. As we adopt PPM, we do the same. With this, the custom training and adoption team is ready and able to scale to meet customer needs more efficiently and productively to improve the customer experience.
Find out more about our internal adoption of PPM in the case study.
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