ServiceNow SPM is a crucial toolset that provides a comprehensive solution for companies grappling with dispersed information silos caused by reliance on various tools. SPM in ServiceNow helps businesses strategize and align all the information from one program. Depending on the requirements, it can help identify, estimate, and choose the right strategy to achieve needed objectives. Moreover, it can be integrated with other ServiceNow SPM modules to add more value and efficiency to the company’s services.
Let’s examine strategic portfolio management, recognize its benefits and main features, and describe best practices for using SPM in ServiceNow.
- What is SPM in ServiceNow
- New Features in ServiceNow SPM
- ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Roles
- Benefits of ServiceNow Portfolio Management
- Best Practices of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management
- Components of Strategic Portfolio Management ServiceNow
- Recap
What is SPM in ServiceNow
Any company’s decisions are part of its strategic portfolio, and it is necessary to make decisive choices about the activities that should be implemented to deliver its vision and influence its success. To align with ServiceNow dedication to facilitating organizations in planning, providing, and monitoring business outcomes across diverse systems, ServiceNow ITBM is now Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). So, what is SPM in ServiceNow?
Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) coordinates work with the company’s objectives to provide services and products interrelated with strategic priorities. With ServiceNow SPM, businesses get more significant visibility, centralized control requirements, resources, projects, and portfolios, and a more detailed view of financial and budgetary data. It also helps transform the delivery of new products and services through agile deployment methods and helps scale companies’ digital transformation efforts.
ServiceNow SPM vs PPM
ServiceNow provides its users with two different tools for business management: Strategic Portfolio Management and Project and Portfolio Management. They are both used to optimize a company’s IT service, but what is the difference between ServiceNow SPM vs PPM?
SPM ServiceNow is a comprehensive tool that optimizes and manages a company’s IT portfolio. It can create a central portfolio overview and prioritize initiatives by importance. It includes financial impact analysis and covers integration with other ServiceNow products.
PPM tools focus primarily on project and resource management within the portfolio. It manages projects and provides some level of portfolio visualization and metrics. Overall, PPM is a part of the SPM module and is less comprehensive than a full-fledged SPM tool.
New Features in ServiceNow SPM
Customers have used ServiceNow IT Workflows products in traditionally non-technology functions. However, since the technological environment is constantly changing in both practical and innovative ways, ServiceNow has decided to change the name of ServiceNow ITBM to SPM in order to meet users’ needs and enable companies to deliver and track the outcomes.
Let’s take a look at its features.
Strategic Planning
This component includes different modular project capabilities that give users the planning tools to connect their company’s strategy with its execution. They can create objectives, track roadmaps, organize work items and plan. It ensures that the workplace is constantly updated and the roadmap views can be customizable. Users can manage milestones at the demand and easily find and reduce potential conflicts.
Agile Transformation
This characteristic enables companies to bestow value, providing teams with the most efficient methodologies that give real-time visibility of product development. Users can keep agile portfolio features in sight and manage them from a single view while the developers can always track the flow and processes.
IT Portfolio Management
This feature enables the organization of the necessary information to enhance and manage portfolios, including service offerings, service catalogs, and service level agreements (SLAs). By integrating portfolios, the company analyzes its possible impact, prevents planning errors, and improves the combination between different portfolios. Insights-based portfolio analytics enables individual portfolio optimization, while cross-portfolio analytics gives a view of interrelated portfolios.
Contextual, Continual, Collaborative
It has to be planned in the context of business, in a continuous process, and provide insights for better decision-making. With SPM, all the changes will be arranged, and their impact will be understood. The organization will be able to adapt to new changes and be under continuous analysis from IT planning and monitoring to execution in all its units.
ServiceNow SPM Modules Integration
SPM in ServiceNow can be integrated with other SPM Module ServiceNow, for example, IT Operational Management and IT Service Management. It enables better management of relations between different services and projects. Companies can keep tabs on the project’s progress and associated service incidents, requests, or problems that need to be corrected.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Roles
ServiceNow portfolio management divides these tasks between its users to provide the best service and keep track of every program or project. Admins and portfolio admins distribute roles according to duties and responsibilities. Some ServiceNow strategic portfolio management roles can be shared with others as each team of users includes both strategic and operational roles.
- Portfolio owner. The strategic role of an executive level. He reads and updates the company’s entire portfolio and assigns roles to other users, such as reading, editing, or deleting records. Its goal is to provide a portfolio that gives value to the company.
- Portfolio manager. The operational role includes administrative competencies such as creating, editing, and deleting portfolios of different types, including service offerings, taxonomy levels, and nodes.
- Service owner. The strategic role of a director-level that may own a branch of services and answers about the given service. He can read all the portfolios and existing services but can update only services he owns or delegates. He can’t change a parent service and is not concerned with the everyday operations of the service.
- Service owner delegate. The operational role involved editing a set of services and delegating service owners. He can only read portfolios and existing taxonomy assets and update services.
- Service manager. The operational role of the director is concerned with service management and everyday operations. Occasionally, one person can be both a service owner and a service manager.
- Process owner. The external strategic role involves defining and evolving the services, procedures, and governance. Its goal is to boost the management of portfolios.
- Process manager. The external operational role is accountable for compatible services and portfolios in the IT company. He guarantees that all the procedures and policies are sustained according to the guidance of the Process Owner. At times, one person can be both a process manager and a process owner.
Benefits of ServiceNow Portfolio Management
One of the main benefits that organizations can achieve by implementing ServiceNow SPM is creating a single tool for projects and data to analyze data on the company’s IT resources and initiatives. With the help of SPM ServiceNow, the company can create an overview of the IT portfolio and identify more and less allocated areas.
Another key advantage is the possibility of prioritizing IT initiatives according to strategic importance and aligning projects with objectives, investing adequate resources, making meaningful decisions, and getting the best impact on the business. Last but not least is combining different tools like resource management and project planning to deliver projects on time and save time and costs. Moreover, by integrating with other modules, companies can make more informed decisions, improve overall IT management, and ensure conformity with vendor agreements.
Best Practices of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management
SPM in ServiceNow is a powerful tool that lets you get the best from the company’s resources. Let’s have a look at a guide about how to implement it.
Define Strategic Objectives and Inventory
The first step is to identify the desired business outcomes by understanding the company’s strategic, both short- and long-term goals and deciding what resources, like budget and people, are indispensable. When the priorities are set up, the investments must be classified and organized to contribute to the strategic success of more critical projects.
Select Key Business Metrics
The company has to analyze indicators that can be used to ascertain success by monitoring process performance and verifying areas that need correction. To align with the company’s strategy, the current projects can be divided into smaller ones to be analyzed to ensure they contribute to strategic objectives. Organizations can also adopt an Agile or Hybrid project management approach.
Strategic Portfolio Planning
The company needs a strategic plan that includes portfolio projects, programs, and initiatives and describes the goals, objectives, and KPIs. The plan has to gauge the administration of resources, budget, and staff to ensure effective implementation of the selected initiatives. The company must examine potential risks and issues that may create problems.
Execution of Initiatives
The company implements projects and programs aligned with the priorities and resource allocations. The management must ensure that the portfolio is lined up with the objectives and adjust to new circumstances. It includes monitoring the portfolio and all its related components, changing budgets, reassigning resources, and making changes when necessary to maintain priorities and achieve business objectives. As all active portfolios must be managed carefully, this phase continues indefinitely.
Components of Strategic Portfolio Management ServiceNow
ServiceNow SPM is a string of applications used to optimize IT services and take the business to the next level. Let’s see what are the components of strategic portfolio management ServiceNow.
Business Model Development
To provide value to the customer through the business’s strategy, companies use business models to organize and visualize the organization’s activities and to combine the client offering, the business capabilities, and the company structure.
Cost Saving
By emphasizing the accurate forecasting of the impact of savings in various areas, strategic financial management helps bring costs in line with business strategy.
Risk and Safety Management
This component detects potential hazards and better secures areas with potential safety vulnerabilities or non-conformities. It provides information about what systems may result in risks, what these risks are, and how best to respond to them.
IT Portfolio Management and Enterprise Portfolio Management
This component empowers teams and business managers to have a general overview of the entire IT landscape and to monitor, control, and maintain resources across the organization.
Enterprise Architecture Management
It outlines the structural elements of complex business systems and enables organizations to better coordinate their resources and tools with the rest of the business.
Recap
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is a powerful tool that helps formulate, adjust, and deliver business outcomes from a single platform. It helps optimize the IT portfolio and improve overall performance, establishes where to focus an organization’s limited resources best to achieve strategic goals, and determines a small number of better activities related to success. Once you use SPM appropriately, you can prioritize tasks aligned with their strategic value and business objectives. Thus, if you want to get the most out of your resources, use ServiceNow SPM.
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