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Debbra McGrath

Debbra McGrath

Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager

ServiceNow Inc.

Debbra is a Principal Product Marketing Engineer at ServiceNow. She has an extensive background in solution sales and product marketing with over 25 years of experience in enterprise ITSM, PPM and Agile management solutions. Prior to joining ServiceNow in early 2018, Debbra held positions with IBM as a Technical Sales Specialist and as a Sr. Solution Consultant for Upland Software, CA and Serena Software. Debbra is passionate about creating engaging technical marketing content to help people understand the unique value of ServiceNow solutions. More about Debbra: linkedin.com/in/debbramcgrath

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Conference Sessions

K22

Align investments to implement strategy

DEM1523-K22

## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. I'm Debbra McGrath, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow. In this demo, you'll see how ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management enables an organization to align technology investments and work execution in order to implement business strategy. With SPM, you'll keep investments continually aligned to your strategies, so that your teams are always focused on the right things. You'll fund what matters most using a variety of planning methods to guide investments, communicate plans, and see work in the context of strategic initiatives. And SPM will help you to make work execution easier, even across diverse teams, methodologies and approaches, so you can ultimately meet and exceed your business goals. You'll experience all of this through the perspective of an executive leader, Jake Elliott, and see how Jake and his team drive the business forward by ongoing prioritization and funding of important initiatives. How they respond to inevitable changes with scenario planning that enables them to keep initiatives and resources continually aligned to business strategies. And how his project management and scrum teams efficiently execute work across traditional, agile, and hybrid work methodologies in order to deliver measurable business value. Jake begins by viewing his executive strategy dashboard, which provides an end-to-end view of his company's overall spend and benefits, which he can also view by portfolio and work execution type. The strategic spend tab shows him how much they're spending by strategy and goal, and how well their initiatives are aligned. The company leadership team has committed to improve alignment of their work and strategic spend to four key business strategies. They believe digital transformation is foundational to the continued success of their entire business. So Jake wants to review and prioritize the investments aligned to this strategy, and then connect team planning with work execution to ensure that business value is being delivered. He uses Alignment Planner Workspace to see a roadmap of all their initiatives. Roadmap planning shows their high-level enterprise investments on a timeline, filtered by their four companies strategies and, color-coded by priority. Jake can see how all these initiatives are tracking relative to important road map milestones, or he can hover over a single initiative to view the milestones specific to that investment. Next, he views the digital transformation portfolio roadmap to see the work that's been planned in support of their strategies. Here he can view the demands, epics, and projects that support their four strategies, altogether on a single roadmap, and he can easily adjust the information displayed on each planning item for quick, at a glance insights. Jake could also easily add new items or drill into an existing item directly from this view. For example, to adjust plan spend without having to open another ServiceNow application. Instead, he decides to use the investment funding application to review existing funding for the digital transformation strategy. Viewing all investments by strategy shows Jake the current strategies that have been funded by year and by quarter, including Capex and OPEX funds received, allocated, available, and total actuals. Here Jake can add or adjust funding for the digital transformation strategy as necessary. He takes a look at a top-down, bottom-up view of the funding for each of their four business strategies, and sees that digital transformation funds include 600,000 for business capabilities, 8.8 million for the digital transformation portfolio, and 600,000 for a Tiger team focused on digital transformation work. Any other type of ServiceNow entity could also be funded as needed in support of delivering business value. For now, Jake is confident they have adequate funding for the digital transformation strategy, and their portfolio of supporting work items. They use the ideation portal to generate a pipeline of innovative ideas that may ultimately be converted to new digital transformation projects. Jake filters the ideas by category to see those that are aligned to digital transformation. And then he sorts them in order of ideas with the most votes. The top idea is then promoted to the demand backlog, where costs and resources can be estimated. Ultimately, this demand will be added to the digital transformation portfolio for further consideration and funding. Jake will now look at several scenarios to determine what work his portfolio managers should include in their portfolios to best deliver on all their business strategies. Scenario planning enables them to consider different sets of demands and projects, as well as different budget amounts. Optionally, scenarios can also span across strategies, and across fiscal years. Portfolio managers can create new scenarios, such as focus on innovation to support their digital transformation. And they can add or remove projects and demands from the plan, such as removing this demand, which is more than the budgeted cost. As selections are made, the details for the scenario are automatically updated and displayed on the right, including total spend, number of selected investments, financial benefit, unaligned projects, over-allocated groups, and any amounts left over by actual spend from unselected projects that would not continue in this scenario. He can also track resources to see if they would be over or under allocated by looking at all resource groups or just over-allocated groups. And viewing them by quarter or month. Finally, he'll compare scenarios, and select the best one. When he confirms this scenario, budget will automatically be allocated to the selected demands and projects in this scenario. Jake then works across their diverse teams with project managers and scrum masters to make sure that the work included in the selected scenario is being executed properly. And with ServiceNow, Jake doesn't have to chase them down for these updates. For example, to get the latest status on the Acme customer sales product, Jake selects the planning console to view the project workspace for this hybrid project, where he can see a Gantt chart showing the project schedule and dependency relationships between tasks. He can add, remove, and arrange columns, and easily adjust the list in the Gantt view. The Dev execution phase is an agile development methodology that's being managed by a scrum team, and the agile board enables Jake and his scrum masters to view all the work that's planned across multiple Agile teams. They can see work dependencies across teams, and each team's backlog of work. A red bar lets Jake know that the integrations team is overcapacity in sprint 2, and red lines with arrows indicate dependencies that are out of sequence. Jake or the scrum master can immediately fix the capacity issue by dragging a story to sprint 3. And they fix the sequencing by moving this story to sprint 3 as well. By quickly making these changes, now all their agile teams have the proper load to deliver their work as scheduled. Of course, Jake needs to continually measure how much value the company is getting out of the investments they're executing on. So he returns to the executive strategy dashboard, and selects the benefits realization tab to see results to date of all their companies benefits by strategy, including what they've achieved for digital transformation. And finally, back on the enterprise roadmap map, Jake toggles the tracking mode to continually monitor how each of their initiatives is progressing toward enabling them to achieve their strategies. You just saw how strategic portfolio management provides Jake and his team with a single unifying solution that gives them complete, accurate, and timely insight into every aspect of their business, enables innovation at scale and speed, and helps them align investments to implement strategy, and deliver measurable business value. For additional information, visit servicenow.com/spm. [MUSIC PLAYING]

1692646803067001XK24

Deliver strategic technology initiatives with Strategic Portfolio Management SPM

SES1516

See how Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) helps organizations align initiatives with business goals by providing a centralized platform for portfolio planning, prioritization, and execution. Learn how SPM enables teams to evaluate project performance, optimize resource allocation, and make informed decisions to drive strategic outcomes effectively. With features like real-time visibility, collaboration and generative AI-powered summarization, SPM streamlines the entire portfolio management process, enhancing productivity and driving business value.

1692646803067001XK24

Optimize technology spend and mitigate risk with SPM, APM, and ITAM

SES2957

See how the CIO, VP of Enterprise Architecture, and VP of Asset Management of a global organization work together to achieve company goals to optimize technology spend and mitigate technology risks while ensuring continuous governance for ongoing success. Learn how the ServiceNow® platform empowers the team, fosters effective collaboration and drives significant benefits with seamless integration of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), Application Portfolio Management (APM), and IT Asset Management (ITAM).

16590311612800012K23

Demo: Deliver strategic technology initiatives

DEM1612-K23

Strategically, it is more important than ever to have the digital dexterity to spot business opportunities and threats early and implement change quickly. But obstacles include poor strategic alignment; resource constraints; and multiple systems of record in disconnected tools. In this demo session, learn how Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) empowers organizations to drive business outcomes by consolidating work planning & delivery; aligning all work to strategy and priorities; and accelerating value delivery at scale so you can maximize business value - all on a single platform.

16590311612800012K23

Demo: Transform digital operations by automating and adapting quickly

DEM1619-K23

Quickly adapt to shifting priorities and remove digital friction with ServiceNow®’s single, unifying platform for digital business. Join this demo to see how companies can continue to grow and evolve despite ever-changing challenges. ServiceNow’s consolidated platform helps drive a cost-effective solution that enables the organization to quickly adapt to change, develop new automation and maintain existing services. Find out how a global retail pharmaceutical company utilized a solution-based approach to plan strategically, increase efficiency through automation and save money on software spending. 

1724429920965001DK25

Industry Keynote: Healthcare and Life Sciences

KEY2551

Life sciences organizations are ready to take meaningful action, accelerating drug discovery, transforming clinical trials, and advancing real-world evidence generation. Discover how ServiceNow’s AI Agents are redefining how these companies work across clinical operations, risk and security, research and development, and beyond. Hear from a global pharmaceutical leader on how they are unlocking new efficiencies, breaking down silos, and reducing costs, all in the interest of creating a healthier tomorrow.