- Thanks everyone for joining us today, for coming to our session, Deliver Strategic Technology Initiatives. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Debbra McGrath, Principal Product Marketing Engineer with ServiceNow, and I'm here today with Doug Page. - Yeah, I'm Doug Page. I'm the Director of Outbound Product Management for Strategic Portfolio Management. - So we thought we'd begin with some good news and some bad news in talking about this presentation. So Doug, what do you think we should start with? - Let's go with the audience. Do you think we should get the bad news out of the way first? I think they wanna hear the bad news first. - Which is good news, because that's how we had it teed up. So the bad news is that, according to IDC, 75% of CIOs will not meet their expected 2025 digital revenue goals. And that's because they don't have their strategic initiatives aligned properly to their goals. And it hinders their business performance. Wow, that's not good. - That's not good, but there is good news. And the good news is there is research that shows if you have good strategic portfolio management practices, you can avoid those pitfalls and make sure you're not part of the bad news. And if you look at this QR code, there's a link to a research paper from Forrester on the benefits that your organization can have from implementing strategic portfolio management. And the bullets that you see here are the exact items we're gonna walk you through in this session today. - So let's get started. So I'd like to introduce you to Aileen Mottern. Aileen is a product manager with an organization that uses strategic portfolio management service, now strategic portfolio management, across their organization. And like other successful business leaders, Aileen attributes their success to three key concepts. The first one, they strategize to increase goal attainment. The second one, they align all their work and resources to those goals in order to maximize outcomes. And the third one is that they're able to deliver value fast using any work methodology, whether that's waterfall, agile, or a hybrid mix of the two. So it all begins with strategy though, right Doug? - Yeah, before we jump in and look at this within our solution, let's take a second to talk about what we mean by strategize. What are we actually doing here? So ServiceNow is certainly not gonna tell you what your organization strategy should be, but we're really talking about is not just setting that strategy and capturing it within the ServiceNow platform, but also saying what does success look like relative to that strategy? So how do we know when we're succeeding? If we say we wanna increase revenue, is success $5 or $5 million? We need those targets, those key results that we need to be able to measure against. So let's take a look. - So getting started, Aileen begins in the strategic planning workspace. And here she has access to a variety of their company portfolios. In this case, the portfolio they're gonna look at is their wildly popular and wildly successful customer products portfolio. And so here right at her fingertips, she's able to see the goals they've set, the status of those goals. And uh-oh, this isn't good. It looks like something's in red. And she hovers over and she sees that in fact, one of the goals related to the items they're working on is in red. So she's gonna quickly drill into the hierarchy to take a look. And sure enough, they have some key goals that are aligned to the customer products they're delivering. One of them is to improve the customer satisfaction score, the CSAT score. And it's in red. Worse than that though, it's not bad enough that her own particular goals are in red. How does that impact the company goals? So she's gonna toggle on the parent level goals. And there are two top level company goals for Globex Corporation. One is to focus on data security and privacy and the other one is to increase revenue. And yikes, that one's in red too. And it looks like part of the reason is because the CSAT score, well, it looks like the goal is red and that's because there's a target that's been set. The target is red, it's because their progress is only 25% and it looks like the actual value is 55% where they had hoped to be closer to 70% at this time. So at this point, I think what they wanna do since it's based on the customer products portfolio, they wanna get some feedback from their customers. So let's take a look at product feedback. - Yeah, and let's talk about it for a second before we look at it in detail and talk about a couple different kinds of intake that you can have within strategic portfolio management. You can have a demand which you can really think of as a business case for a large funded piece of work but where the real insight is is from individual users, customers who are using the product and that's exactly what we're gonna look at now. - Exactly, so in this case, we're looking at all the feedback they've collected and we can filter it based on different things like customer, maybe a specific customer, you have a customer meeting. Let's take a look at the customer feedback they've provided application. In this case, they're looking at that Globex customer portal products. They wanna see what's going on with it. So it's filtered by that and they can see feedback based on the left-hand side tags like user experience, mobile experience, technical details by customer. Scrolling down, they can see stats as well as overall sentiments and they can take a look at sentiments whether they're positive, neutral or negative as well as look at those sentiments over time on a bar graph or a line graph and check them out and sure enough, it looks like a couple of them are in fact negative. So in order to figure out what's happening here, it looks like a lot of the feedback is based on user experience and performance and she's gonna drill in and take a little bit closer look and here she sees that feedback. So she's able to look at all the feedback and again, it doesn't matter if it came in from email, from a phone call, from a customer meeting, it's all here and all different types. She can see the sentiments. She can sort it, group it by different methods. In this case, she's just gonna sort it by name and right away, she sees three feedbacks around the topic of AI and it happens that they were given to her, given to the team by two of their top customers, right? So their enhancement requests and two of them are positive but sure enough, one is negative. So she's gonna drill into that one and take a look in more detail about what's happening and looking at the feedback again, this form shows her, yep, it was collected at a customer meeting. It was in fact negative. She can look at attachments as well as any collaboration that's gone on and in the middle where you see the activity, it looks like most of the people that have looked at it think, you know, this is a pretty good idea. We'd really like to do this. So she expands it to look at more detail and right here, it takes her a few minutes to go through 'cause this is actually a couple pages and she's scrolling through. Because it's such a great idea, she wants to share it with the team. So what she'll do is actually use a new feature we have, Doug, right, summarization. - Yeah, so we've launched this month two Gen AI features within The first one is exactly what we're seeing here is the ability to summarize a product feedback. So sometimes a customer might write a nice, concise, short description of what they want but very often, they end up writing you a two or three page letter and you're like, I don't wanna take the time to read all this. It would be great if Gen AI could summarize that for me and this is exactly what it does. - And from there, the next thing we'll do, we're taking a look at that feedback. The team thinks, you know, this is super popular. Let's create an idea, a product idea for this. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna take these three feedback on AI and we're actually gonna, they wanna create a brand new idea. So they're gonna link this to a product idea. Here are the list of ideas that have already been submitted. You know what, there's already one for AI. Seems to be a very popular topic here. that feedback to the idea and then once they link it to the idea, the next thing that happens, they say, you know what, let's make a formal demand out of this and that's not the only way we can, speaking of ideas and excuse me, speaking of AI and demands, that we can handle demands. - So we did launch this month two Gen AI features. The other one is conversational demand creation. So we can leverage Now Assist through virtual agent to capture from end users their demands. So they no longer have to fill in these long forms. This makes it really easy for people to capture these. It helps for better standardization of the information that's captured and in the end, it's gonna lead to productivity. And in this case, it's kind of funny because we're using Gen AI to capture a demand about creating a Gen AI feature but that's just the way it is these days. - Is it funny or scary that AI is creating its own demand for more AI? I don't know but I think it's a good thing. So the other nice thing about this too is that if you're using Gen AI with other applications of ServiceNow like ITSM, you already know how to use it. It looks familiar, right? This is right from the employee center and they go there to request a laptop or a phone and they can submit a demand. - So that takes us to the end of what we've done for strategize which is really to capture that strategy and also look at the work that we might wanna consider and we got 10 minutes left so we're gonna go faster. The next thing we're gonna look at is how we can align which really means from those things that we've considered, the things that customers have asked us to do, what are the things that we should invest our people and our money in that's gonna help us lead to those business outcomes that we saw at the beginning? - So let's jump into it. So let's see how Aileen and her team do this. So in addition to that demand, right? They think, you know what, that was super popular. So they're actually gonna then promote that to a project. So they've now got a formal AI project that they're working on too. And they need to be able to align this to their goals and prioritize it. One of the ways that can help them prioritize them is through scoring. So out of the box, ServiceNow supports three scoring mechanisms, value versus effort, way to chart a stub first and RICE. And RICE is based on four criteria, reach, impact, confidence and effort. And in this case, this new project, the AI chatbot project, they say it's really low effort, but it's a huge impact. So they're gonna bump it up to five stars, which increases the RICE score higher than any of the items on the list. And that's gonna help them when they go to prioritize. So looking at planning prioritization, they can further assess all the different items so they know what the best work is to do to achieve their goals and the company goal to increase revenue. And they use Moscow prioritization. And here, what they're gonna say is, this is a must have item. So they're gonna select this as a must have. And because it's a must have item, the RICE score is so high, they're also gonna rank it number one. So they're just gonna simply drag and drop it. After they've finally finished reviewing it, they're gonna prioritize this item, which automatically adds it to the customer products portfolio roadmap, where they can see all these different initiatives all on a roadmap. And they're grouped by product and subgrouped by primary goal. They're also colored by planning item type. And this portfolio happens to include demands, projects, epics. You could also include collaborative work management boards and other planning item types right on this board. And they can track all these items against milestones. So they know whether or not they're tracking against key events like a customer conference. And they can also, if they want to, personalize it to add additional information either right on the board or on the planning items themselves. And because we're so focused on revenue, increasing it, they're really focused on the cost and they're gonna add the planned ROI. Once they've done that, when hovering over an item, they can easily see then, they can see that it looks like the planned benefit exceeds the cost and it looks like there's a healthy ROI. There is a slight problem though. The dependency line is red and that's because the AI chatbot project is dependent on the completion of the multi-language support project. move this out to April and that might be fine but we also wanna align resources as well. It's not just the work, the demands of projects and epics, the resources that we have. So the first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna move this back and instead we're gonna look at resource capacity to do the work. And it's good we're doing that because right away we see there is an issue. The development team is overutilized in the month of March and expanding this, we can see exactly where the bottlenecks are. So we're gonna talk to them and we're gonna decide to move it out all the way to May. So I think, Doug, it's time to deliver. - I think so but let's go through what we've done so far. We've done strategize, we've done our alignment, we've selected the work and now we are gonna deliver. And what's interesting about delivering on the ServiceNow platform is as executives who have set that strategy and selected the work, we don't really care how the teams work as long as they get the work done. So they could be working traditional, they could be working agile, they could be hybrid where these two are coming together. All of this can exist on the ServiceNow platform. - All right, so we'll pick it back up. So ready to deliver. Now we're gonna go to the project workspace where they can manage any type of work. And so the first thing Aileen sees are any projects that either she's a project manager or she's assigned as a team member. She can also look at all projects. And again, this is waterfall, agile or hybrid projects all together. She can easily create a new project and apply a template. When we created this project from the demand, a template was automatically applied for it. And that template, if we take a look, we're gonna drill into the AI chatbot project. It was a hybrid template. And we can tell that because the development phase is an agile development team and they're using enterprise agile planning. - Yeah, and just a quick comment about our new enterprise agile planning capability. What you're seeing here was released in Washington. So in February, brand new. This is our next generation of scaled agile. So not only does it support all of the safe configurations, it also provides a lot of flexibility because a lot of our customers say, we're not safe, we're safe-ish, which means they need flexibility to work the way they want. You can get that now as of Washington. - All right, so the agile release trains, we can see that we're looking at the backlog across the different agile release trains. We can take a look at the capabilities they're looking at, or they could switch and look at epics as well as features. And then looking at the planning board, we'll toggle on the dependencies and we're able to see the dependencies between items on the planning board, as well as if there were any dependencies across different teams, we would be able to see that too. And simply drag and drop to be able to move. We can easily add new capabilities, epics, or features, as well as stories and track those in this agile planning as well. And so now, the next thing we're gonna do, again, going back to our resources, we wanna make sure our resources, we've aligned them, but let's take a look a little bit closer because when we applied that template, leveraging the ServiceNow automation platform, we also automatically assigned tasks to both groups as well as individuals. So we already checked out the development team and we're pretty sure they're good. We looked at that capacity, we figured that out, but we've got some other resources too. In this case, George is an individual resource handling the control phase. If we scroll across, we can see that's fine, looks like he's good, but Paul, our project manager, has a ton assigned to him. So if I click into him, sure enough, looks like he's overallocated in the last two months of May. And we can easily just adjust that just by drilling in. And fixes it for some of it. It may be that it's other work that we need to adjust, so we're gonna keep this here. Or we'll just overwork him a little bit. - I think so. So in addition to this, we can also track analytics, we can track RIDAC, risk issues, decisions, actions, changes, and importantly, we also wanna make sure we've got the right financials for this project too. So we've got a budget of $85,000 for the project, and Aileen and the team are happy to see that the totals today are 21,000, estimate at completion is well within their budget at $38,000, and on a monthly basis, they can track line items, both CapEx and OpEx. And so Doug, I think at this point, they're pretty happy with this, and they probably wanna tell somebody, right? Report on it? - Absolutely, and what's the most common way to communicate within our organizations? It's probably PowerPoint. I think so. So let's do that. So we're gonna... - So what we're gonna see here is by the simple couple of clicks, I say single clicks, there's a couple of clicks, you can select the template that you want, you may have different PowerPoint presentation templates with different levels of details for your project. You can also do this at the individual project level, or you can do this at the portfolio level to report on multiple projects at the same time, and you get branded PowerPoint presentations with all the status for your projects, as well as other types of work that you're managing. So is that the end of our story, Doug? - Not quite. We're doing all this work because we wanna influence and impact business outcomes, so let's see the result. As these teams are doing the work, we're actually having an impact on our customers and on our revenue, and we're gonna see how things work out for thee. - All right, so the team is busy working, and we're fast-forwarding in time, and then lo and behold, five months later, we're gonna revisit the customer products portfolio to see the status, and whoa, everything's green, we're really happy this time. So we're gonna drill in, there are no red items, let's drill in and take a look, and sure enough, that CSAT score is green, very good. We're gonna toggle on the parent items and drill down here, and yeah, let's adjust this and let's look at this. So the CSAT score, we had actually just hoped to be 70, and it looks like we're at 110% because we achieved a score of 72, where we were only shooting for 70. So you think it's time to celebrate? - Well, work is never done, and we're always doing continuous planning. Do we see anything else but green on this dashboard? We see some yellow, makes us realize that there are other things that may be at jeopardy of us achieving a result. It's a chance for us to reprioritize, put people onto other work, and continue to deliver business outcomes. - Well, I think Aileen and her team have no problem with that. They're confident that they're gonna be able to turn this to green too, as well as any of their strategic technology initiatives. And that's because they use strategic portfolio management on the ServiceNow platform, and because they keep in mind three important concepts. And what are they, Doug? Well, they're three super important connected concepts that we went through. Does anyone remember what they are with me? The first one is strategize, align, and deliver. - And if you'd like to hear any more about any of this topic, please come visit us. We're in the expo at Zone 3, literally right across there. We have our SPM and APM booths. We're happy to talk with you more. We'll meet you down at the end of the stage as well. And we'd just like to say thank you for joining the session today. - Thank you.