people coming and so we're really excited to have you here today i'll just say it one more time we are recording this um so it will be available immediately for you all to review and i'll provide that link all right we are at top of the hour so let's go ahead and get started thanks take it away thank you so much lisa and thank you everyone for joining uh i am john hose i'm going to be your host for today's session on roadmap planning and with me is my colleague doug page i'm a business management solution consultant i've been with servicenow approximately three years and prior to that i actually came from the client side i uh worked at two large companies that were clients of servicenow and was involved in a number of servicenow rollouts that they did so i come from this not just as a practitioner but as a user uh doug do you want to introduce yourself sure uh so as john said my name is doug page i'm a product manager with our itbm product i've been in this space for a long time and i am very excited to talk about our topic uh today i think uh this is something customers are gonna love excellent thank you doug so let's start by talking about the business management suite overall and where road mapping can be used so road mapping is a new feature that is going to be available shortly with the quebec release and as i'm building this slide out the overall business management suite operates in a number of areas so at the top we have strategic alignment what are the organizations strategies at a corporate level at a business unit level what are the time bound and measurable goals we may be working towards and what are the metrics that we're using to track our achievement of those goals or our achievement of value the middle section is that alignment space you know we're going to manage work across different business units different portfolios we may be managing specific products services or applications and we need to understand sort of how does that work that we may be doing in our space fit into the larger large initiatives that the organization may have at a high level sort of what we might call big rocks that we want to achieve and then at the lowest level we have that execution space that's where specific teams or individuals are actually going to be executing that work and the you know business management suite provides for you know agile hybrid or traditional waterfall execution methods we can interface with some other common tools that our clients may be using but at each of these levels we're going to have different personas who are going to have an interest in roadmap capabilities and will want to have that connected picture from that top level you know what is the high level strategy the organization has what are we trying to achieve as an organization down through that mid level of sort of what is each area working on down to even what as an individual contributor might i be responsible for if i do have an area of responsibility so three of the personas we're going to look at are going to be an executive leader a portfolio manager well and i'm gonna say we were supposed to have another uh face there but our product owner um so they work at different levels within the organization each managing a different section of work and wanting to connect it up to that overall whole so that as a whole organization we understand where are we going we also understand if we're making changes what are those impacts throughout the organization both tops down you know what is being set at that sea level as the direction for the company but also bottoms up you know what work is happening within our product application or service space what initiatives are being requested and how are they going to fit into the overall picture so let's talk about what is roadmap planning so roadmap planning is that ability to visualize from the top down and connect that up to other data elements that we're going to need to manage the work you know what strategy is impacted by the work what resources might be used does it align to any other programs and this is how planning is done you know within our clients there's going to be some annual planning up front and then we're going to manage to what that plan was and adjust as we go and it may start it often starts at that very top level the executive level you know what are sort of the c level executive setting as their major initiatives for the year and then it filters down to each of those subsequent levels you know based on what the overall direction for the organization is what do i need to do within my business unit within my portfolio of work and how does that then get pushed down to again the team-based individual contributor base level how do i need to manage my service my application you know my product within that overall framework and you know gartner estimates that road mapping capabilities you know are key to the success of clients and you know innovation leaders today um they're basically identifying that you know 63 percent participate in some business strategy planning again that's what's going to drive most of these road maps and that 92 percent are then involved also in technology innovation decisions to various degrees and roadmap planning is really going to pull both of those views that sort of what is our strategy what major initiatives do we have together with that what technology might be impacted so the three personas that we're focusing on today across those different levels and again here we do have our product owner in as well you know for an executive leader you know they need to have that top-down planning they need a way to communicate out to the organization here are the major initiatives that we are working on you know this year this quarter you know potentially multi-year initiatives so that everyone down below sort of understands how their work fits into the overall work of the organization you know they want to be able to respond to change quickly and they want that information to be accurate and timely you know when a lot of this work is done and one of the companies i worked at previously you know this is going back quite a few years and before we adopted servicenow the work was executed you know in excel spreadsheets and then building out road map visualizations and powerpoint it could take weeks or months to you know update one of those views so by the time it was communicated out the data was already stale you know other decisions and changes had been made and you were sort of always working with a data deficit what they're looking for is a way to connect those roadmaps up to capabilities and strategies they want that overall view of investments you know across the corporation and they want a way to visualize and communicate it out you know at that mid level where we have you know portfolio managers business unit leaders you know they don't want to only work within bottoms up planning you know that can be too granular it can take too long to sort of collect everything and sort of have to try and sort through it constantly there's certain initiatives that we know we're going to have to execute and we want to be able to get those planned and communicated out quickly they also want shared stakeholder you know understanding of the work they want a way to visualize what's happening and they want a way to get that consensus without relying on you know powerpoint and other manual tools you know that's going to help them prioritize their investments you know it's going to help them visualize and communicate out you know the work and the objectives to gain consensus or make adjustments and it's also going to help them adjust you know if they do need to pivot if they do need to move something they're going to be able to see what other impacts it might have and make those decisions much more quickly and then more at that team-based individual contributor level where we may be you know a product service or application owner we may just be managing you know work for a specific space you know we want a way to understand what the needs are you know for our clients these might be internal or external clients but we also want to have a way to visualize you know the roadmap for our specific product you know we may be a small part of a larger whole but based on that corporate direction we need to understand what is the work we may be being asked to do and what is the other work we want to then fit in that will be part of our own roadmap part of the decisions we're making about how we going to evolve our you know product service or application what work do we need to do and we want to be able to have you know a high level strategic visual summary of that so that we know we're going in the right direction and again we can communicate that out to our stakeholders and overall the desired business outcomes that all of these different stakeholders are going to be looking for across all levels of the organization you know how do they align strategic investments to get more value and to scale that work you know that is really the key here you know we want to know that we are working on the right things at the right time and we're delivering the highest level of value to the organization and we also want to make sure that we've aligned those initiatives either to you know the objectives and needs of the business as a whole or to the you know specific product objectives we may have whether that's again a product service or an application so what we're going to see in a moment doug is going to take us through the roadmap planning capabilities live and what roadmap planning allows us to do is you know plan from that top down so we can drive these different initiatives down through the organization you know align our work to you know strategies and other key criteria and again communicate that out to the organization overall what you'll see is that there's a great ability to you know quickly change and adapt and update the work and again that's all going to be real time because it's on the platform so if we do make a change whether that's at the corporate level business unit level or product level all the key stakeholders are going to know once that change is committed and some of the other key capabilities we can bring in additional detail we can group the work you know do we want to view this by business unit do we want to view it by portfolio do we want to color code it by you know strategy or some other criteria do we want to pull in information that may be helpful to executing the work around you know what are the costs or the benefits of the various initiatives what resources would be needed so it's really going to help us manage that work overall and some of the capabilities that will be coming in future versions of roadmap planning as we have additional releases we're going to tie it even more tightly into investment funding so that we can also be tying this into our tops down budgeting and into uh capacity planning so that we can get even more of those resource management capabilities tied into our road mapping and to scenario planning so that we can also look and have different versions of our roadmaps and understand well if we do want to make these changes you know next quarter next year you know what other impacts might we have and how do we want to build out potentially different scenarios of the way we might execute work so we can find the one that is uh most appropriate would deliver most value back to the organization so with that i'm going to hand this off to doug to lead us through the demo so doug do you want to take over sharing absolutely thank you very much john and just while i'm bringing up my screen one thing that i'll just mention you had talked about um this being part of quebec this is actually going to be released uh next month through the store uh all i can say that under safe harbor because that hasn't actually happened yet but that is our plan uh to get this release next month it does require uh the instance to be on quebec because we're leveraging some uh components that have been released from a platform perspective in quebec so john did a great job of introducing what roadmap planning is and i have the pleasure of walking you through some examples that customers might use so first of all this is the home screen for the alignment planning workspace that's what customers are actually going to be downloading from the servicenow store and one of the capabilities within that alignment planning workspace is this roadmap planning and you can see here i've got at the top left two different options i can see plans roadmap plans that are owned by me or i can see ones that have been shared by me so right away you can see that this is meant to be collaborative with people working on these plans together the other thing that you'll see on the top right i can easily create a new roadmap so when i click on there i can see this is very easy to do i just need to give it a name what's the name of my roadmap i'm going to give a start and end date what's the planning horizon is it a quarter is it a year is it a three or five year plan that's all going to be determined by these dates that i set and then you're going to select the table that you want to use these are the ones that come out of the box that are pre-set up but your administrator has the capabilities to add any uh object onto this so not that you would want to but the capability exists to roadmap incidents for instance again not necessarily a great use case but you can certainly do that and then for whatever table you used you can set up filters so for instance if you're looking at projects you might want to say what projects what's the criteria for the ones that are going to be on this roadmap the first example that we're going to talk about is a servicenow implementation roadmap all of us working with servicenow we're pretty used to looking at this so here i see a list of roadmap items or a visual of roadmap items if i come to the roadmap details on the left hand side it's going to show me these are actually projects that i'm looking at here and i've filtered to say i want projects where the business application has been tagged as servicenow so of course that that makes sense because this is the servicenow roadmap and i can see this is basically a one-year roadmap that i'm working on and paul martin is the actual owner but i'm a stakeholder in this roadmap so i can collaborate with paul on this roadmap so what i see is a list of these projects with their dates and of course just like we created that new roadmap i can create projects right here so john talked about the the uh transformational way that we're now allowing organizations to do planning here so instead of what we've done previously is just have a list of projects someone's managing the details and because of those dates we'll see a visual roadmap of what's happening here we're actually creating in this roadmap these initiatives just as uh you know you would do in these planning meetings workshop meetings on a whiteboard when do we want to do these different items i can come directly here and i could create a new project put the dates in and it's going to appear on the roadmap and that project obviously also gets added to my project list but just to see these lists of projects doesn't give us a lot of information we probably want to start doing some using some of those additional features that john had explained the first thing i'm going to do is to group by so you'll see a series of fields here your administrator can determine what fields show up here but i want to see all of my servicenow projects grouped by strategy so right away i'm getting some context into how these servicenow implementation projects are going to have an impact on the outcomes for my organization from a strategic perspective i can also add by the way a second grouping strategy on the left hand side here by selecting the second one here but i'm actually going to come up here to this color coding i'm going to want to see who's responsible for these projects which business units are being impacted so i can ask for that color coding and right here i can see a list now these business units and who's involved with these projects and then finally i can add information directly to these road map items in this case the projects i can see a picture of who's managing that project as well as adding up to three items to each bar so i'm gonna add the costs how much is each one of these servicenow initiatives costing us i'm going to look at what the benefit is that we're getting from each one of these initiatives and the result of those two is my planned roi so now as i'm planning my roadmap i can see what the benefits are of these projects because this is really meant to be interactive so i can see projects with a high roi i may want to move those up in my timeline to have that benefit sooner i might also say this project i don't think it's lasting long enough we want to plan this to uh go longer or you know start earlier uh change the duration and not just move these around you can also drag and drop them so i could take this and drag it into another strategy and by doing that i'm actually updating the information on that project the the strategy field on that project is getting updated and these are interactive so if i want to come here and say well instead of looking at the grouping by business unit maybe i should be looking at these uh by phase for instance i want to see where we are in delivering these projects so i can see the ones that are further out in green they're still in initiating but i can see some of the ones that were working like the csm one is being delivered the itsm one phase one is closing we're executing our apm project these are very interactive so on the fly you can see different information about these roadmap items a couple other things that i'll just point out besides the personalization you can also click onto any one of these roadmap objects and see the information so in this case they're projects i'm going to see the project details and directly from here there's an option for me to go in to edit that record so without leaving the context of that specific project it will open up a new tab for me and i can go in and say you know i don't think we've estimated the financials correctly let me go in there and do an update and then i'll be able to see that on my roadmap so very easy access to the items here the next thing that we can see is an unscheduled item so we're going to look at some some ways that this can be used from a product perspective if there are features that don't have any dates to them and you want to schedule them you can pull this from these unscheduled items and bring them directly onto your roadmap and then finally we can have conversations here about this roadmap it's meant to be collaborative we've seen that there's a group of us that are stakeholders for this roadmap so we can use this conversation to have discussions around these roadmaps let's look at another example that was a very uh specific example for servicenow projects a lot of our customers are obviously managing from a project management perspective so these are going to be projects or programs in this case they're actually programs if i come to my details here i can see in this case i'm looking at high level programs that the pmo is responsible for that are then of course supported by uh projects um but these are initiatives across the organization not just those that are being run on the servicenow platform so these are gonna have a much longer time horizon i can see here i'm going into 2023 but i'm looking at very similar information i'm looking at the strategies and here i'm looking at the business units as well so very similar functionality that we're using just a different scope within the organization of what's being included and here i'll just point out one other area that we can manage you can have attachments directly within here so in this case this group at the at the pmo or epmo level has a quarterly planning meeting where they go through this roadmap and they actually capture the meeting minutes and they attached them directly to this roadmap about you know what was said how we got to this roadmap what decisions were made we're capturing all that here so we can come back and reference it and then another type of roadmap that you can do is this product roadmap so rather than looking at pmo project and program we might look at a product and look at epics and features so here in this case instead of grouping by strategy i'm grouping by theme that we have for these features and in this case i've color coded by the actual products so i can see which features are being delivered for which products and what themes those are hitting on so those are just some different examples that you can have that you can use here and i'm sure as customers you'll come up with a lot of different examples this could be used uh you know from a marketing perspective it could be used for a customer communication anything that we road map that we want to visualize that tends to be done in powerpoint we can now uh do this through this roadmap planning functionality and what's great for our servicenow customers who have itbm already and are using it you can actually execute these items on the platform and have that really good connectivity between the roadmap planning activities that happen in the actual execution that's happening within servicenow as well so i think i'll stop right there those were some examples that i wanted to cover and maybe we'll go to some questions hi doug thank you that is excellent information and as you said at the start this is i think very exciting functionality that's coming out we do have two questions that have come in already and if there are any others please feel free to type them into the chat the first question from chris is can road mapping be configured to show both projects and demands so that is right now you have some flexibility there through the source table you can use plan tasks to get various items in there of different types but in our second release we're going to augment that functionality where we're going to be allowing a field mapping because although you can do some of this right now it doesn't work exactly as as we would want it to where you could have a field mapping so when you say hey i want this specific field to display on um on that roadmap item it would know to grab those various fields across the type that you're doing and they would be able to bring those in so there are some basic use cases that could be done we have a lot of customers looking at hybrid planning where they want to see features as well as projects some of that could be done today but there's uh there's some limits on to uh how that's gonna work so but it's definitely something that's a high priority on our roadmap to be able to to uh deliver that in a more elegant way in a second release okay excellent uh the next question what about resource roadmaps can this be done off the resource table uh you could do that um i think john you know one of the points that you had made in one of the slides that you had showed about what we're working on with this what we see customers really wanting to do is to plan work here but be able to see the constraints that they have being resource financial constraints so that's one of the things that's being worked on within this alignment planning workspace is how we can deliver functionality through this workspace to not just do the road mapping but also to say you know i might visually say well i've got a lot of work going here in july is am i going to be able to do that am i going to have bottlenecks from a resource perspective or possibly even from a financial perspective so for the planner to be able to visualize those constraints uh is is the real use case that we see uh clients asking for okay excellent uh patrick is curious to know uh will this be part of standard or pro licensing or what the difference in capability would be between those yeah so that's a good question so it will be available through both of those license but with slightly different functionality so for uh standard customers they'll be able to do road maps for demands and projects and then basically everything else would be in pro uh the other tables that i showed here that would be programs any agile items plus the ability to add in other objects from the platform all of that will be part of professional okay excellent and uh brenda is curious that you mentioned that it's going to be available from the store but it will also be included with itbm licensing yes exactly so available in the store just to this the reason why we go through the store is is not really anything to do with license it's still all the regular uh licensing a pro applies there's not like a cost to download it from the store you just need the the itbm licenses to get it from there if you have that licensing you can download it at no additional cost the store is just how we get functionality to customers faster without having to wait to one of our uh two family releases that we do a year so rather than waiting for um a quebec family release we do this through the store and we'll do our updates to this through the store as well to get that to customers faster okay excellent um and then i'll say we just have a comment um from one of our attendees who just says wow i think you just solved world peace for me this is amazing so i'll say thank you very much for that comment that's the the sort of feedback we love to hear um the last question we currently have and doug i'll say i don't know if this is something you can talk to now or maybe we can send some follow-up information um how does one enable roadmap planning um you know how is that feature turned on i don't know if that's something you can speak to or show now quickly or if that requires a longer answer uh i can kind of give the kohl's notes on that and then if there's additional questions uh they can reach out to me directly at doug.page at servicenow.com uh so there if they download that from the store there's a couple of items that that will get installed like there's uh there's some uh components around the roadmap planning that will uh be included with that store app that gets downloaded there's also some roles that are included with this there's a roadmap administrator who can do some of the setup around what fields can be included and then there's a roadmap manager the people that are uh basically creating these road maps uh becoming stakeholders uh so it's it's not complicated you just have to know those uh those basic steps around installing that uh application and managing those roles that will be added with that app okay excellent thank you next question that we have when we move the bars on the roadmap does that propagate those changes to the individual project dates and would changing the dates also update resourcing if it exists very good question and yeah so the when we move a project here where we're modifying the approved dates for that project so we're not giving project managers heart attacks when they come in the morning about what happened to my project dates and i think that's a a good desired functionality for customers but certainly i'd be open to your feedback there so the the the approved dates have changed we use that as kind of a signal to the project managers you need to update your project someone's asking you to do this earlier someone's asking you to delay your project and then it's up to them to move their project either you know moving some automated functionality we have on that project or they might want to do something a little bit more manual to say well if this happens now it's happening over summer i need to change some of my deliverables and things like that so we're basically leaving it to the pm to determine how they're going to respond to those changes and approve dates okay excellent uh then another question uh if you expand a project does it modify the values and i'm assuming that may mean the dates so i'm thinking they're saying if you extend the end date or the start date does that change the values for the project yeah same answer that's only going to change that approved start and approve and date no impact to any other dates on the project okay excellent uh so we're just at time um i don't think we have any other questions so to uh just two more quick questions one was will it be available to developers soon and another question is is this considered quebec or rome features as in it will it be the out of out of the box in which so uh it's uh it will require quebec to use this functionality available in the store in rome when it gets trued up i'll have to follow up on that question if someone has if that was the question when this gets available in a family release please email me and at doug.page servicenow.com and i will get that answer and what was the first one sorry lisa um will it be when will this be available to developers oh uh yeah so it's uh the the the target date for us again under uh safe harbor is that this will be available in uh our store release in february which generally happens on the third thursday february so right now that date would be the 18th of february okay great well thank you all again um please do find it on the community if you have further questions and then our experts will be able to engage with you there ongoing i will put it right back into the chat just to make sure you have it before we wrap up and again we thank you and we look forward to you all joining us for our next last thursdays coming in february we'll have that posted on the community sometime soon all right thank you all any other last questions