Is your organization running IT like a business, with visibility into demand and financials, alignment with business goals, and management of projects and resources? Or is IT running itself like a runaway train, with no direction and no one in the driver's seat?
To get that train back on track, you can get on board with ServiceNow solutions for IT Business Management, including Project Portfolio Management, or PPM.
In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we take a quick tour of the applications that make up PPM, and guide you to resources to learn more, including the Project and Portfolio Management playlist on our NOWsupport YouTube channel.
What is PPM?
Project Portfolio Management is a suite of applications that provides a simple, team-oriented approach to managing IT projects throughout their lifecycle.
What is Demand Management?
The Demand Management application helps you capture, evaluate, prioritize and approve business requests for implementation consideration. People within your organization provide these ideas for projects or enhancements (strategic requests), or change requests and defect fixes (operational requests). Promising ideas are shared between IT and the business unit, and approved ideas will become demands. The demand is reviewed by stakeholders, and if approved, becomes a project.
What is Project Management?
With the Project Management application, you can create, view, and manage a broad range of projects. Projects flow through phases, which are configurable to match your PPM governance processes.
The Project Workspace provides a single, user-friendly, unified workspace for project managers to define, plan, track and monitor all projects.
To manage several projects at once, you can organize them into portfolios.
What is a portfolio?
A portfolio is a collection of related programs, projects, and demands typically organized by business unit or investment type.
What is Portfolio Management?
With the Portfolio Management application, you can create portfolios, perform financial planning and monitor the status and progress of entire portfolios to include:
- Costs and benefits
- Resources
- Schedules
- Risks and issues
You can access all of your portfolios from the Portfolio Workbench.
What is Resource Management?
The ServiceNow Resource Management application helps resource managers to create resource plans, request and allocate resources, and analyze resource availability and utilization.
Note that you can create resource plans in the Demand Management process, and they'll be carried forward when you create the project.
What is Time Sheet Management?
The Time Sheet application lets project managers assign project tasks to worker resources. Workers then enter and submit their time entries in the Time Sheet Portal for approval. When project managers approve their time, expense lines are automatically created in the project.
What Financial Planning options are available in PPM?
The Demand Management, Project Management, and Portfolio Management applications support financial planning. You can allocate, track, and report on costs for individual projects and entire portfolios.
What Reporting options are available in PPM?
From the Project Status portal, you can access a detailed status report for every project you manage, showing planned and actual costs, resources, milestones and risks.
You can also run reports in the Resource Management application.
For a more detailed report that you can customize, use the Report Designer to configure a report, preview it, then share with other stakeholders using the integrated Share panel. You can also share PPM data as shown in the video Working with Dashboards.
What other applications are available in ITBM?
PPM applications are just a part of ServiceNow's IT Business Management product. ITBM also includes:
- Application Portfolio Management (APM)
- Agile Development
- IT Financial Management (ITFM)
We'll be adding more videos about these ITBM applications to our Getting Started with ITBM video series, so be sure to check back. Or better yet, subscribe to our NOWsupport YouTube channel to get notifications when we post new videos.
For more information
Run IT like a business with IT Business Management (ITBM) (Customer Success Center)
Project Portfolio Management (product documentation)
8/10 Expert Q&A: Project Portfolio Management (PPM) (video on Community)
Creating Reports (product documentation)
Dashboards (product documentation)
Time Card Management (product documentation)
