welcome to service now techb bringing you an inside look at our products I'm your host Steve Miller today we're going to talk with product managers Irene V and Doug Paige about service now's collaborative work management application which helps teams plan and visualize and collaborate stay tuned well hi everyone uh today we're lucky to have in our studio Irene V and Doug pagee welcome Irene and Doug thank you thanks for having us we be before we get started talking about collaborative Work Management I wonder if the two of you could tell our listeners what you do here at service now sure so we're both part of the SPM business unit strategic portfolio management business unit and we're part of something that service now calls outbound product management so most of the time when people think of product management they think developing the product road maps we don't do that we take the the great products that our inbound product management team is building with engineering and we work with important stakeholders which are customers Partners our internal sales teams we work with industry analysts to make sure that these products are successful in the market and Irene is uh leading the effort for collaborative Work Management yeah hi Steve I've been working focused on the collaborative Work Management project for the past year or so all right and how about when you're not at work what fills your hours and days I've been training for a triathlon so that's taking up most of my time wow that's really good whereabouts do you live where would this Triathlon be uh I'm in San Francisco and so the triathlon's going to be in yosee all right wow nice how about you Doug I also pretend Irene's not pretending I'm pretending to be athletic I'm in Montreal I'm training for a half marathon in October hoping to beat my personal best at 54 years of age we'll see if that uh comes to fruition still cold up here so it's tough to get motivated to go and run but that's what I try and do with my pastime very impressive both of you all right well let's talk about collaborative Work Management then to get us rolling I wonder if you two could tell our listeners just what is the collaborative work management application so collaborative Work Management or cwm for short is a central hub for knowledge workers to plan visualize and collaborate on work with their teams and it's really intended for kind of everyday work ad hoc initiatives and informal projects just think about work that's not a full formal project that's managed by a project manager that has resourcing and funding but more the kind of things that you're jumping into a spread sheeet to use as a Tracker or you're using other tools like monday.com or a sauna to track something that's not quite a project not an epic not in demand and that's really the work that today is falling through the cracks and that's why we've created cwm to be able to capture and centralize all that work so is this a tool that would tend to be used earlier in a project before it be comes something formal not necessarily that's an option but a lot of work just never needs that full level of project management and so it could be that maybe in the early stages in the brainstorming you might be using this and then creating a full project about it but often we find that customers have work that is more lightweight and they want a lightweight tool for it so a couple of the features of cwm are spaces so teams can create a space for their work those could be cross functional teams or a dedicated team based on a department and they can choose who they share it with what level of access those users have and then within those space they can organize their work into boards and docs so boards are like task trackers or just any customizable list of data and then docs are collaborative documents think shared notebooks for things like meeting notes brainstorming drafting other documents well maybe you can tell me why did service now develop cwm Steve I think hopefully everyone your listeners know that uh service now builds great purpose-built Solutions widely recognized by industry analysts as being leaders and yet we see the users of the service now platform still going to email task list Excel to try and manage this work that they do as teams and and that's problematic for us because we love to say the world works with service now so we want to bring that work onto the platform and make life better for our users and for our customer base so that's really the main problem that we're trying to solve as Irene was describing this kind of this informal work that happens within collaborative Work Management Service now is already very well known in that formal work what is generally called strategic portfolio management the work that Executives have visibility to that is has that formal funding that is a space that we're already really well known for it's a nice adjacent space and a really a connected space for us to go into one of the advantages of having all of service anal applications built on this platform is it brings them all together we have a common set of resources and we can use data from anyone in any other does cwm uh benefit from that does when customers go into these other Solutions whether it be XL email it's basically that information's in silos and as you said Steve our customers have invested heavily to have not just their technical architecture but in many cases their entire business architecture on the service now platform and yet they have no visibility into all this ad hoc work that's happening around that work so whether that work is related to a customer case uh a risk an application a business capability a value stream a problem from service management all of that can be tied together so that we can see that work that's happening which which is really powerful to give that visibility to people within their organization and people that are on the platform okay it sounds like it has a wide variety of uses then what kind of different users and roles would this apply to so this is really intended for kind of any knowledge worker on the platform anyone that has work that they need to plan tasks that they need to keep track of cross functional teams they're interfacing with uh I think they can all benefit from a product like cwm all right that's a good background can you tell me about some of it's specific features sure so I'll talk about a couple features that are really unique to cwm the first is the ability for endusers to create custom columns and custom item types so teams can create custom columns on the fly to manage information about their work they can create things like labels dropdowns uh special date fields and then what's really cool and unique to service now cwm is they could also create a custom column um of a reference type and that's going to allow them to pull in any table that they have access to on the service now platform and Link their existing data to these custom tasks that they're creating and this is really the first uh product with in service now where end users have this level of customization that they can do without needing to contact an administrator or get approvals and all of this um customization is unique to their space so it's GNA not going to mess with uh anyone else's work it's just for their team and then in addition to custom columns they can also create custom item types so I mentioned those boards earlier and those are often for keeping track of tasks uh but you could also create a board for any other type of work you could create a board of events you could create a board of links that you're keeping track of or deliverables that you're making and again those work Custom work item types are going to be unique to your space the next uh feature I want to talk about is automations so once again this is an enduser customization that teams can do without administrative support and they can set up these automations to automate repetitive tasks or to automate sending notifications based on task dates that are coming up or when fields on task change so this is going to empower users to take control of their workflows by enabling them to create and customize these automations without having the need for an administrator's interference the next feature I want to talk about is our docs component this is a component that was especially built for cwm and it's actually being adopted across the platform and other products as well but this doc component allows um multiple users to collaborate on documents without having to switch to another tool or without losing the context that this work is related to it also lets users tag and at mention their co-workers and teammates and then also reference any other work on the now platform so you could tag an incident that you are working or collaborating on and also tag people within those docs and then the final unique feature I want to talk about is the ability to connect to strategic portfolio workspace or the planning portfolio workspace so if customers also have SPM strategic portfolio management they can roll up their cwm boards to a planning portfolio and then within that portfolio they can prioritize and roadmap their cwm boards along with their projects epics and demand and so this is going to give that high level visibility into the progress of work while at the same time giving the teams a flexible and lightweight tool that's easy for them to use okay given all that what does that bring to a company to individual teams within a company and to the organization as a whole no I think you worded there right because there's value to the organization a whole and also very importantly there's got to be value to the end users these teams that are using the product so if we talk about the organiz ation first if you look at the research from Forester Gartner one of the things that's top of mind for technology Executives is simplification of their application portfolio for cost reasons for risk reasons they're trying to reduce complexity and it's one of the reasons why customers love putting things onto the service now platform so that's really from an Enterprise level is this is attractive from them from a cost and risk perspective if we think about the individual users we're trying to help prevent them have a swivel chair so if I'm part of a service management team and I'm handling incidents and I we have a problem that we want to manage I don't want to have to swivel into a different application try and copy over data have things that aren't referenced to each other if I can do this all on platform it's going to make my life easier that's better productivity better job satisfaction happier employees that's good for everybody and then the other thing that's really amazing with the launch of collaborative Work Management and Irene had talked about this I think it's good for your listeners who probably pretty familiar to a certain degree with service now platform we've done a couple things that are first times for the service now platform and and those are in user configuration so before as an end user or as a team if you wanted a new field you'd go to an an administrator the great administrators that we have across our customer base and they'd be like okay get in line we're going to put this on our backlog literally in real time now A Team can decide hey we need this field to be able to track these tasks that we're managing they can literally do this in 5 seconds so that's really amazing and then the second piece that we've added again to support these teams and Empower them that's brand new on the platform is these teams these end users can create these automations that Irene had described first time be before anything had to go through flow designer you were going through whether it's a central administrator or local administrator to get that done and these teams can now with point and click directly through collaborative Work Management create their own uh workflows which is really empowering for them oh that sounds like it's just really in step with the overall trend within the company of uh empowering The Not So Savvy user to manage data and workflows on their own yeah absolutely all right given that I wonder if you could uh give us some examples just some use cases how would people use this tool yeah we've heard so many use cases from the customers that we've talked to from everything to planning for contract renewals to creating sales plays to facilities manag but I think we can also talk about how we've used cwm internally at service now so in the first two weeks that we turned on cwm for us at service now we had over 500 users get in there and start planning their work everything from product teams marketing teams strategy pricing and Ops teams but I can talk about how we've used cwm to manage the launch of cwm a little meta example launching a new product there's a lot of steps and it's not a super rigid repeatable process this isn't something that we do every day so it's more unstructured things come up we have new ideas we're collaborating with a lot of cross functional teams and that's what makes this the perfect product for this type of work so we have boards for things like our action items I have one for recording this podcast we have another board where we keep track of all of our deliverables we have custom columns for if this is an internal or an external deliverable we have the URL we have which team is responsible for it what stage it's in we also keep all of our meeting notes in there where we can tag each other in action items we can tag the relevant tasks the relevant deliverables and what's really great about it is that now everyone knows where to go if they need any document that we're working on if they need to see what their action items were they don't have to track down other products they're not looking through multiple systems they know that cwm is their One-Stop shop to get everything that they need and it's of course easily customizable to how we're working and we're able to quickly respond to changes what has been the role of our customers in developing this product yes so we've worked with many design Partners who have seen early mockup of the product and provided their feedback and that feedback is really directly going into our road map because it's such an adaptable product and has so many different use cases it's been great to hear from the customers about how they intend to use it and and it kind of take those real life use cases from them it's actually been really encouraging and a lot of fun to see the feedback from external clients the internal users you can tell people are really into it I've been in other situations before we're like hey can you try this out they're like yeah it looks good keep on going here we're getting internal and external customers give us a lot of feedback this is fantastic but can you add these six things and they're very specific about what they want and you can tell they're really engaged they're actually using it day-to- day and I think that's been uh one of the fun Parts about this speaking of fun Parts one of the really fun Parts about hosting this podcast is to hear the evolution the story like this for so many products and the role of the customers in developing it is just one of the common themes so I'm not a bit surprised to to hear that it's a big part of your Evolution as well yeah we had a a fun Story the National Hockey League the NHL maybe more familiar to some customers depending on where you live they're a user of SPM depending on when people are listening to this they're coming to knowledge this month to speak about SPM and Irene introduced them to collaborative Work Management and they called the next week and said we we've got an important use case we want to use collaborative Work Management for this something that was pretty strategic for the NHL so it's really fun like to see these examples where you're adding value to clients and they can see how they can leverage our technology right away it's really rewarding yeah it's fun to have it happen in things that you and I would see in our everyday lives like the NHL yeah yeah I did mention I was from Montreal so that's a bit of a giveaway yeah I put that together all right let me ask you You' given us a snapshot of what cwm is like today I wonder if you can tell us what's on the horizon for cwm down the road sure so the features that we're focusing on are really about centralizing and combining work so some of the features that we're considering are a single Hub where team members can view a combination of both their cwm and SPM tasks so they'll see their cwm task across multiple spaces they'll see project task demand task Etc and this is going to provide them a great place to start with visibility into all of the work that's assigned to them without having to jump into multiple workspaces or multiple cwm spaces the next feature that we're looking at is the ability to roll up a cwm board to a project phase and so this is again about having to provide the visibility at the project level with the flexibility for the end users and then the next is a connection to agile workflows so we'll have the ability to support any type of work process whether that's agile waterfall or hybrid and the ability to manage a unified backlog as well as uh Sprint planning all right well how can a team figure out if cwm is the right tool for them that's a good question I I picture in my head one of those logical charts where you go through and you ask the questions I think the first question is do you work in a team if the answer to that is yes then you're still going along it might be for you I think the next question that we would ask is who's leading your team is it a formal project manager who's gone through PMI project manager Institute Training and are they managing detailed financials they're probably going to live in our SPM our strategic portfolio management tool but the answer to that is no then you're pretty much bang in The Sweet Spot for collaborative Work Management which in reality is probably about 80% of the work that happens in the organization it's only really 20% that is really in that formal funded work we're tracking all the budgets but there's a ton of things that we do every day and Irene had given some examples that are really in this uh sweet spot for collaborative Work Management so yeah if I would just go through that checklist again we work in teams we're self organized the person who's leading is not a project manager maybe we don't have a leader at all we're just doing this on our own that's a lot of work that happens and even for us from the Strategic portfolio management bu we're using collaborative Work Management uh every day okay so if somebody wanted to use cwm right now how would they get started sure so from a licensing standpoint um if they're an SPM customer cwm is actually included in their SPM license uh at no additional cost so that's both for the standard and the pro license but it's also sold as a standalone license so if you're not an SPM customer or if you want to expand your user base and get cwm for other users you can contact your account team about uh getting those cwm licenses if if you are an SPM customer you can just go into the service now Store and download the app today and assign the cwm role to your users and you're basically good to go there's a couple of other optional steps and we've created a five minute implementation guide to walk you through that um but it's really easy to set up and get going again because most of your customization is things that your end users can do themselves okay you mentioned the implementation guide what other sources might there be to get more information on this our community page which is going to have a quick start guide that will have everything you need to know about cwm about using it about implementing it and you can also look into the product documentation for more detailed information okay that's been a great summary I've learned a lot about cwm and hope hopefully our listeners have too is there anything else you wanted to uh to add before we wrap that we're super excited to have our customers collaborate within our collaborative Work Management tool and to see what they can do with it all right thank you both very much for joining us this has been a a really good episode thank you very much thanks Steve thanks please tell us what you think of this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more information on any service now topic take a look at our product documentation or knowledge base or our service now support YouTube channel thanks for listening