hello everyone and welcome to our webinar on the project in portfolio management journey part 1 or as we like to refer to it surrendering the spreadsheet this is the first of a three-part series on project and portfolio management my name is Neil mefferd and I'll be your moderator for today's session in today's webinar we will cover three topics first we want to get you a better understanding of who Kovac is and why we are uniquely positioned to be your partner for a ServiceNow ppm implementation second we want to give you an overview of the ServiceNow ppm suite and third we'd like to provide you with guidance around where you should start your ppm journey the ServiceNow ppm suite is a set of powerful tools that can help transform your organization's PMO but starting with too much change too fast can cause severe organizational heartburn and worse stop a PMO transformation in its tracks almost as fast as a lack of sponsorship today we will not only share our recommended approach for a ServiceNow ppm implementation the journey if you will but we will provide a live demo of our recommended start to this journey before we get started let me introduce the team as I previously mentioned my name is Neil mefferd and I'll be your host for today's webinar my role of Kovac is director for client delivery and I have over 20 years of IT industry experience specializing in the delivery of enterprise software development and systems integration projects as well as helping companies establish sound demand management project management and portfolio management processes joining me today is Lynn Reynolds who will provide you an overview and demo of the ServiceNow project in portfolio management suite Lynn has over 18 years of public and private IT industry experience including project and vendor management and over 11 years of ITSM process design process improvement and delivery experience when is ITIL foundations p.m. p.m. scrum master certified as well as a certified ServiceNow implementation specialist as we go through today's session if you have any questions regarding what is being presented please feel free to type your question into the question box located on your screen we'll do our best to answer questions at the end of the session but for some reason we are unable to get to all of the questions we will follow up via email also the contents of this webinar will be posted on our co Vesak website at wkyt.com for playback or sharing with other members of your organization who are unable to attend today's session with that let's get started since its inception in 2001 Quebec has garnered a reputation for providing superior consulting services to our clients we are headquartered in Kirkland Washington and employ over 250 senior level consultants averaging more than 15 years of professional consulting and IT operations experience and we have been delivering service management services since 2001 Cove Essex expertise is organized into three practice areas our IT operations services practice focuses on developing standardizing and operating IT operations functions including cloud and enterprise infrastructure security operations applications administration and operations build and run our project delivery services practice focuses on providing project leadership to deliver complex IT projects Cove Essex experience and project management ensures compliance quality and that timing of projects and deliverables aligned with our clients lifecycle practices finally our IT Service Management practice focuses on assessing defining and implementing optimized IT Service Management solutions with ServiceNow being our only service management solution partnership Poe Vesak is a unique partner in that we combine deep ServiceNow platform expertise with a specialized practice area focused on creating ppm solutions and project delivery within our service management practice area we perform service management assessments and roadmaps education and training process design and implementation my TSM ServiceNow readiness planning and ServiceNow implementation and integration services we also have a ServiceNow developer on-demand support service that we offer to our customers on a subscription basis you are due to our long-standing service management practice that predates ServiceNow Kovac is a true professional services firm that partners with our customers to design and implement solutions that meet requirements minimize custom development and optimize scalability with that I would now like to turn the presentation over to Lyn to talk to you about ServiceNow ppm suite the classic recommendations for starting your ppm journey and to provide you with a live demo of our recommendations for where your journey should begin Lyn Thank You Neil welcome everyone and thanks for joining us today just getting set up here there we go so what you see on screen is a high-level view of ServiceNow service strategy elements the service strategy suite is comprehensive and encompasses project portfolio management application lifecycle management and IT financial management and it manages the entire project lifecycle from ideation all the way through to project closure and financial reporting the ppm suite sits within the service strategy suite and is fully integrated into the ServiceNow cloud enabling project and operational staff as well as management and customers to leverage the same seamless platform across the enterprise ServiceNow provides companies not only visibility into project related work but also non project work creating more realistic views of enterprise resource workloads for companies already using ServiceNow to manage operational work ServiceNow makes it easy for staff working on projects to get quickly up and running on ppm within an already familiar tool for companies new to ServiceNow mastering management of your portfolio lays the foundation for expanding into operational areas management has a clear view of what their teams are working on both projects and non project work from within a single system the tool is a one-stop shop for both executive decision-making across all categories of work not just projects from a customer standpoint ServiceNow is the one and only tool you'll need to interact with from from support related issues to new ideas for project investments teams managing projects have the flexibility to create and manage a wide range of projects from a few small tasks to large portfolios of projects containing complex activities with various task dependencies and project managers have the ability to use both agile and waterfall phases within a project finally both operational and project metrics may be exposed on a variety of role-based tailored dashboards and home pages so as we mentioned ServiceNow ppm has the ability to align project investments and consolidate resource and project data into a single system being part of the ServiceNow application portfolio it manages a seamless in to end process for managing work that initiates an Operations and that later results in a project the problem that many organizations face however is answering the question where do we begin the road to a mature ppm process can often be rocky and it's important to take manageable steps to demonstrate value in a short period of time so this demo will focus on our recommended three phase maturity roadmap and in particular the four key activities within that first phase to help organizations get near-term utility out of the suite what you see on screen is our recommended ppm roadmap if you're like many organizations out there you don't have a good way of capturing requests or demands for new projects new project ideas are sometimes shared verbally sometimes they're sent at an email where´s yet sometimes they're never captured at all because the person who has the idea doesn't know how to submit it for evaluation if your organization is a bit more mature you may have a regular PMO meeting where business representatives bring new project ideas to the table for discussion these list of project ideas often take the form of massive spreadsheets or SharePoint lists if your idea even makes the list at all comparing demand requests against each other is also challenging there's often yet another spreadsheet or a list of project suggestions to review in order to do comparisons and finally when a demand becomes a project there may be no standard way of managing the project more or less more spreadsheets more power points are created throughout the project lifecycle to not only manage the project but to also report out to the PMO or the CIO I can't tell you how many times I've seen an Excel list of projects with a red yellow green health indicator in a current status column the good news is all of these spreadsheets can be replaced so all of this can be done with phase one of Cova sticks three phased approach to PBM the goals of phase one are to collect ideas and demands from the organization have a repeatable way to decision those demands to create a project of portfolio of projects with enough information to support executive or high level status reporting and the goals of project our phase number two are to introduce program management to enhance project templates to support various projects of various types and to introduce agile and waterfall phase capabilities within projects the activities of the third phase really close the loop on project budgets cost management resource management time tracking and planning and managing resources across project and non project work across the enterprise now let's dive deeper into this first phase of your ppm journey and explore the four key activities within the first phase to help launch ppm within your organization let's play out a scenario in this scenario I'm working at a company that's already using ServiceNow for incident change problem CMDB and Service Catalog I recently had an incident come into our security organization which thankfully they were able to put a workaround in place and quickly get us up and running again when the security team performed their root cause analysis they came up with an idea that might prevent this issue from occurring again the CIO will need to evaluate this need against the other strategic needs of the organization before she approves funding of the idea and officially approves it as a project so I will now walk you through the generation of that idea the evaluation of the demand that came from the idea creating and managing The Associated project and finally portfolio reporting in the form of a dashboard so with that I'm going to end the PowerPoint presentation and go over to ServiceNow okay to start off our live demo today we're going to have a look at ideation right now I've started out on the standard service portal that comes with the ServiceNow instance this is a collection point where a business users can submit ideas for projects and enhancement requests on my screen I've logged in as a typical internal user named Susan Smith the ServiceNow self-service portal is our users one-stop shop for all requests and services this portal is completely tailorable but for the purposes of this demo we've not made any changes to the default page so to get us started I'm going to start off with submitting an idea so when I click Submit idea it opens up the idea form this form like all forms and ServiceNow is fully configurable and you can add any field you like the important thing to keep in mind is to keep the idea submission form fairly simple or else you'd risk your customers not wanting to use it and users always have the ability to attach a document or additional information about this idea request so for our purposes we're asking our end user to enter a title for their idea and a description and we've added the business justification field to this form as it's a common data input for ideation so we'll add some high-level information here there we are so now that we have some high-level information on the form I'm going to submit the idea once I do that you'll see that I have a confirmation up in the upper left corner that the idea has been submitted I also see the number associated with that idea and I do have a link to click into the idea if I wish to go look at it I'm going to go back to the main portal page on the main portal page you'll see all of the ideas that have been opened by Susan Smith for our next step we're going to go to the actual user interface the ServiceNow user interface and I'm going to switch gears and impersonate or login as Diana temple so Diana temple is both the demand manager as well as a portfolio manager for three different portfolios Diana's access to these applications is based on roles and permissions as with elsewhere in the system and as a demand manager I can review ideas submitted in order to qualify them as demands we may later want to produce products projects for so if I go under self-service and under the idea application we will see the new idea that has just been submitted by Susan Smith I have the opportunity to work with the user to get additional details to understand what it is they're suggesting and do keep in mind that the detail details around this idea will be fleshed out more when it reaches the demand stage up in the upper right corner we have defer and accept defer actually will complete or cancel the idea and it won't move further in the lifecycle accept approves the idea and turns it into a demand so for this example we're going to accept the idea by accepting the idea you'll see the demand record has been generated and linked to this this idea and there's a link to the demand record in the upper left corner if I click the link to this demand record we'll see that it's been submitted by Susan Smith the idea and the original the original idea has been submitted by Susan Smith Smith and Wynne will see that the category has defaulted to strategic the type has defaulted to project we'll see that the title of the idea has been mapped to the demand the description has also been mapped over to the demand and the business justification has been mapped to business case we can use this assessment data section to capture some high-level characteristics about this demand such as high level financial information kind of an order of magnitude sizing and strategic alignment other ServiceNow tabs provide other information about other areas but we're not recommending turning them on until later we'll get more detail around cost and resourcing in the third webinar so I'm going to set some high-level information about this demand you would do this with working with the requester we'll give it a perceived impactive medium going to give it a risk level of high since it is a compliance requirement and the last thing is we want to associate this demand with the portfolio and in the case of our example we're going to associate it with the security operations portfolio and then we'll also give it an expected starch so let's not start this until after the new year all right I think that's everything so I'm going to save the demand who did that by right mouse clicking so once I save the record a couple other things happen the financial return is calculated based on the financial characteristics I put in a moment ago the total costs are calculated as well as an ROI you'll also see that stakeholders have been added stakeholders are associated with the portfolio selected and these are the folks that would likely participate in your stakeholder review meeting of demand records coming in into this portfolio now that I have the high level information about my demand beyond what came in from the original idea I'm going to submit it and what happens next as I would prepare the demand record for review for my stakeholders if there's any additional information I need to put on here when I feel the demand is ready for review by the stakeholders that I'm going to move it to the screening stage once I move it to the screening stage you'll see that calculated metrics our metrics have been calculated again based on the criteria up above in the assessment box and this is going to produce some scored values associated with this demand that we can use for comparison against other demand records so when I hold my regular staring community meeting with my stakeholders I can easily run through all the demands currently in the screening stage the demands that get approved for further evaluation I will qualify and the ones that are not approved I'll defer so let's just assume that that review with my stakeholders has happened and I am ready to pursue this demand record as a potential project so I'm going to move it to qualify later we can use assessments to manage screening by stakeholders remotely so now my demand record is in a qualified state and if I go over to the demand application under the workbench and I open up the workbench UI you see that you have a list of qualified demands in the top half of the screen the workbench is split into two panes in the top half shows these demand records related or compared to one another in the four quadrants and the quadrants are really based on relative values of value or risk of this potential demand and then likewise there's a list of the demands below with their high-level characteristics to be used for comparison I can actually move the bubbles around on the bubble Church on the demand work bench and as I do that the risk and value values actually recalculate dynamically so this is a visual way to work with your stakeholders and figure out which of these demand records we want to pursue as projects so I'm going to go back to my demand record that we proposed early on and if the type is project you'll notice that you have create project under the related links and you can use this create project link to create a project from this demand so I've now created a project from this demand this has been approved to move forward and you'll see a couple of things you'll see that there's a link to the project just created in the upper left hand corner and you'll also see that they make the demand record has been moved to the approved State you'll also notice that a few things have come over from the demand record to the project but I'm going to actually open the project first now I guess these are things that have come over from the demand we've mapped the project name from the demand we've mapped the portfolio from the demand we've also carried over the business case which as you remember started out with the idea and move through the demand to the project we have carried over the plan start date and we've also mapped over the perceived plan benefit so all of those values have been brought over from the demand to the project and as with every other application and service now other fields can be mapped from the demand record to the new project if desired I also want to point out a couple things about this project there's a several related lists down at the bottom of this record for capturing other information in particular there's a way to capture risks and issues about this project I'm not going to create any issues or risks with this project today but you will see risks and issues associated with other projects when we get to the dashboard if you notice in the upper left hand corner we have the opportunity to apply a template to this project some templates allow you to the ability to do a couple of things if you want to have consistent phases or consistent cue milestones across the projects in your portfolio you can drive this in with templates your standard ServiceNow instance is going to come with a sample PMI template I've actually crafted an additional one that's phases and milestones for the purposes of this demo we'll go ahead and use the out of box sample PMI template now one thing to note when you use a template if you have durations associated with your project tasks it will honor those durations when you apply the template and actually calculate your in date based on those project test durations so if you need to adjust the timeline of your project you can go into the activities that have just been added and adjust those durations so now that we've created our project and we've associated a template with the project we're going to go into the planning console when I go into the planning console I can see the five phases that came in from my template if I click into one of those phases not that way if I if I click into one of those phases there we go you'll see the project tests that have come in also from the template underneath that phase and those tasks have brought with them their test dependencies they've also brought in plan duration and so you can see here on screen you've got the start of a high-level WBS or a high-level Gantt with the project activities the phases the task dependencies the plans start and end date and durations you can adjust these project activities from this view from this console you can actually redraw the lines in between the project tasks and adjust your project plan in that way and you have the ability to move project tasks up and down in the in the ws using the arrows as well as indent and outdate activities so this lets you know that you can build your project plan inside the planning console and we'll be digging into that a bit more in the second webinar alright so now I'm back on my project record we're gonna look at portfolios a little bit here I've currently got this project associated with the security operations portfolio if I needed to adjust that portfolio I would click on the magnifying glass and that's going to open up the list of portfolios I can choose from your ServiceNow instance comes with a list of out of box boilerplate portfolios that can obviously all be adjusted if I needed to create a missing portfolio create a new portfolio I would do it by using the new button and just as a note you will need to have the IT project portfolio manager role to be able to do that which Diana temple has so here I would fill in this form or any other fields that I want to collect about my portfolio on this form and then hit create portfolio and I'll have a new one but for the purposes of our demo I'm going to go ahead and leave this project associated with the security operations portfolio and I'm going to click into that portfolio to see what else is going on in there alright so I've clicked into the security operations portfolio if I go to the portfolio status this is going to give me a list of all the projects that are associated with that are contained within the security operations portfolio and some high-level characteristics about each of those projects so here you see kind of perceived values around risk cost scope schedule resources and an anticipated ROI as well as a calculated percent complete associated with all the projects that are within this portfolio if I click into one of our records this is a project record associated with the with the portfolio and from here I can again adjust high level values about this project that then drive this overall view this is actually the one that we created earlier let's go there so here I can put again some high level characteristics high level settings around this project and if I hit update update dashboard it pushes those values down into the lower screen and then that drives they attributes about each of the projects within this portfolio list so this can be used to support discussions with your PMO when you want to see how your projects are performing within a particular performer portfolio relative to one another and which ones possibly need more attention or ones you need to dig into so the lastly last thing I'd like to show you is underneath the project application we've got the portfolio manager dashboard and the purposes of the demo have not tailored this dashboard much from out of box at all you've got open risks that are associated with projects associated with the three portfolios that Diana manages again any open issues associated with projects for the three portfolios diana manages as well as key milestones you can see the count of active projects associated with the portfolios that diana manages as well as again key milestones and if I click into any of these bars I can then get to the list of projects that make up that count make it on the graph to take a look at individual project records and I think I actually skipped a step earlier let me go back here one other thing I neglected to show you also within the project record we can go to the project workbench and from within the project workbench this is another view kind of another graphical view of your project phases project tests are below and this is the view that can be used to add one of three flavors of Phase waterfall agile or tests as well as milestones if I elect to add a waterfall phase I can add project tasks if I add an agile phase I can add user stories for doing scrum and if I add a test phase I can add test activities and test cases if I click the milestone button I have the ability to add milestones including designate key milestones so there again is another way to continue building out information about your project beyond the planning console that then can be leveraged in your dashboard and also on reports ServiceNow also offers a very robust reporting application it's got several out of box reports around projects demands and portfolios and those can those can all be tailored and added so I think to sum up ServiceNow allows companies to get a quick handle on their project list capture high-level characteristics about each project for comparison and decisioning as well as provide a simple means to capture demand for new projects and consider those demands in a procedural eyes way this approach can quickly meet the goals of most executives who want to begin managing demand and their portfolio and it lays the foundation for more robust project tracking later it's a quick simple approach to getting started with ppm and ServiceNow so with that that completes our ppm demo and I will now turn it back over to Neill all right Thank You Lyn let's see here there we should have my screen up now hopefully through today's demo you will be able to see a clear benefits of using the ServiceNow ppm solution ServiceNow ppm can not only replace a spreadsheet you are using to track demands and projects but it can also be the one and only tool you use in your organization for both project and non project work before we open it up for questions we would like to remind you that this is part one of our three part series on project and portfolio management please be on the lookout for further invitations to parts two and three of our webinar series in q1 we will feature the second phase of our roadmap with a webinar titled planning the work working the plan and in q2 we will present our final ppm webinar of the series which will be labeled full lifecycle ppm managing the enterprise if you have a question for today's session please submit it using the question box on your screen do our best to answer as many questions as possible but should run out of time we will follow up with answers via email lastly if you'd like any additional information please feel free to send us an email at ServiceNow at Co Vesta calm with that let's get started with our first question alright first question I have here is can I manage my project within ServiceNow when you can absolutely manage your entire project and all the project details within ServiceNow you can do that as we saw earlier by either building out this project tasks inside the planning console inside the project record itself or you can also import a project file say from Microsoft Project into service now and it will honor the task relationships and the task hierarchy and you can begin managing it inside the project application and we'll get into more of those details in the second webinar and then you also have the option of only managing your project at the portfolio level just at the record level and not including project test detail it's your option all right looks like we have another question here the second question is can I customize dashboards by role or login absolutely you can tailor who can see dashboards in a variety of ways either by permissions assigned to group through roles through a variety of settings so if you have one dashboard that you only want your CIO to see or maybe your leadership team to see separate from say the PMO or project personnel you can have differing dashboards and they can all be managed through permissions and roles great next question here is can the tool also be used to document and track technical dependencies for the user stories or demands I'm assuming that's on a specific project technical dependencies so again you can have what are fall phases and you can have agile phases within the waterfall phases where you have the project test and test dependencies and then within the agile phases is where you have the user stories I would actually need to look and see if there can be relationships drawn between user stories and project activities but they can be contained within the same project file underneath those two underneath those phases and a similar question here Lynn came in on can use ServiceNow as a document repository for project artifacts you can there's a managed document application within ServiceNow there's also a very robust knowledge base within ServiceNow and you can also always attach records or attach files to any record when in ServiceNow so you've got a kind of three flavors or a variety of ways that you can track your project documentation and associate those files with your project records it just depends on the particular needs of your organization and what you're trying to accomplish all right next question here is what if I want to track project budget costs and hours in ServiceNow so there are several applications within ServiceNow we really took a look at idea demand and project today but there is also the financial planning organization or organization application also the cost management application there's resource resource planning and tracking so there's additional applications within the suite that you can use to build out your budget track across build out your resource plans and track time and use those to not only show that cost and our details with your projects but also with operational and non project work again that's a little bit more kind of sophisticated management inside the tool suite and we will get into that into the third webinar excellent I have one more question here so far and that question is I don't want to use idea and just start with demand so we actually encounter this a lot it's kind of 50/50 ish we have a number of customers that start with de Mia or start with idea and take that idea all through the lifecycle all through to the project and then we have other customers that prefer to not start with idea and and actually just um create a catalog item or a web form out on their portal for capturing demand requests or a new project requests and then again following those through the the same life cycle up to project so it's up to the organization what they want to use for their um kind of customer facing intake method whether they want to start that at idea or started at demand and then build out the rest of the lifecycle to get you to the creation of a project and managing that project either can be done actually well thank you Lynn that concludes today's session thank you everyone for attending and remember to keep an eye out for upcoming webinars happy holidays