Energize Project Management using ServiceNow ITBM

Written by Piyush Kumar

Business Analyst Digital Commerce at Royal Cyber


IT is the engine that underpins productivity and innovation today. It is no longer a back-office operation. Instead, it transforms customer engagement, drives employee productivity, and enables organizations to achieve a competitive edge and unlock insights.

With changes in the business environment, IT project management requires immediate attention and transformation as organizations struggle to deliver projects on time and within budget. The project management teams want to respond immediately to changing business needs, accelerate delivery, and optimize portfolio value. According to a report by Pulse of the Profession®, 11.4% of each dollar invested on projects is wasted due to poor performance. The project's poor performance leads to low throughput and quality due to a lot of complexity and poor visibility.

So how do you drive improvement in the project lifecycle? How can you streamline your projects so that they deliver value to the business? How do companies accelerate deliverability and enhance predictability?

The answer is the Project Portfolio Management suite of applications in ServiceNow. Organizations can use ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM) to manage projects, demand, resources, finances, reporting, portfolios, and timesheets. In this blog, let's learn how and why organizations must leverage ServiceNow ITBM to improve project predictability and accelerate delivery.

ServiceNow ITBM: Reimagining Project Portfolio Management

Managing projects with ServiceNow ITBM ensures precise alignment of IT with business goals. Alignment between the two can help deliver value and support better outcomes. Compared to other project management tools, ServiceNow IT Business Management can:

Centralize Demand Management: Before IT Business Management, project teams struggled to adopt a structured approach to capture and assess business demands. Usually, organizations receive dozens or sometimes hundreds of IT projects every year. In traditional project management tools, each project was managed individually rather than as part of the project portfolio. Demand always outstripped supply, which means that the organization couldn’t optimize investments nor prioritize projects. There was no way to balance risks, costs, and time to value. Since the project teams arbitrarily made decisions, business stakeholders were always dissatisfied due to project delays.

ServiceNow ITBM enables organizations to understand business demands at ease. It helps communicate realistic expectations to the project teams, which allows them to deliver superior business outcomes. IT Business Management also captures supporting information from across the business in one place, allowing companies to compare project investments and maximize the project portfolio's business value. ServiceNow IT Business Management centralizes business and IT requests to streamline the process of buying new products, services, enhancements, and repairs.

With ServiceNow ITBM, the project teams can use a fact-based, structured gating process to initiate projects, increase business stakeholder satisfaction, and ensure transparency around investment decisions.

Consolidate Tools: Many organizations struggle with multiple, disconnected project management tools. These tools don’t help the project management teams as they don’t provide the visibility a business needs into individual projects and project portfolios. With no single source of truth, lack of visibility, and low project throughput, organizations struggle to track overall project costs, take fast corrective actions, and allocate resources.

To ensure predictable project delivery, ServiceNow ITBM provides a high-level of visibility and control over the projects. This module helps organizations reduce cycle times, minimize cost deviations, increase project predictability, and plan strategically. IT Business Management also brings together Waterfall and Agile methodologies and project management and test management capabilities to transform the way projects are managed.

Enable DevOps: Development and operations teams use different disconnected systems and processes. For instance, release management and change management processes are related but managed separately in an organization.

ServiceNow ITBM connects development and projects with operations, which enable organizations to break down silos and manage the two together. This platform delivers demand management, project management, release management, and other ITSM capabilities that allow seamless end-to-end project management and data flow. It also ensures that release management and change management are handled together, and changes are directly converted into demand.

Unify Resource Management: With traditional project management tools, resource management was a challenge. These tools couldn’t allocate resources and skills to projects smoothly. It was difficult for organizations to engage resources completely, which resulted in project delays and wasted resources.

ServiceNow ITBM captures all the organizations' resources, whether dedicated or not dedicated, involved in various projects. It combines resource management with project management, IT service management, IT operations, and other vital functions. There might be instances in which operations teams involved in deploying a new software project release might also be involved in other day-to-day activities. This module captures all such resources and tracks their work activities, which results in no conflicts, on-time delivery of projects, and reduced project costs. It unifies resources not just within the project team but across IT. IT Business Management also accelerates project delivery, ensures resource and cost visibility, maximizes resource utilization, and avoids operational conflicts. ServiceNow IT Business Management helps project and resource managers plan, request, and assign staff to projects and track resources' availability.

Smooth Project Execution: A few years ago, organizations were struggling to manage their internal projects. They had experienced but disconnected resources—developers, project managers, etc. Organizations used siloed project management tools, excel, and spreadsheets, and there was no way to consolidate and prioritize demands and resources and create visibility. They looked for project portfolio management tools to help them plan a portfolio and track its progress from a centralized location.

Effective project portfolio management is vital. ServiceNow ITBM is a leader in the strategic portfolio management of organizations. It helps baseline the current project's performance so that organizations can track progress over time. The module also helps establish project portfolio policies that prioritize project goals and success metrics throughout the project lifecycle. IT Business Management helps define, prioritize, and evaluate strategic initiatives and ensure that they align with its cost, profitability, customer satisfaction, and risks. The ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management application delivers a scalable approach to managing projects and ITIL processes.

IT Business Management: The Missing Link

ServiceNow IT Business Management transforms the delivery of new products and services in an organization. It helps align IT investments with business goals and enable organizations to achieve better outcomes and respond more rapidly to change. Using IT Business Management, organizations can adopt modern project management strategies and build a solid foundation for projects that support organizational objectives.

Royal Cyber has partnered with ServiceNow to help clients worldwide smoothly manage projects, resources, demand, etc. If you have questions or are interested in learning how we can help you adopt ServiceNow IT Business Management for meeting your project portfolio management needs, you can contact us at info@royalcyber.com

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