Innovation enablement

The final area of value we will cover in this chapter is the enablement of your organization’s ability to innovate and execute new opportunities. This is typically not something tackled as a primary objective in an initial implementation of ServiceNow but there is a lot of value to be unlocked here and so we will cover the opportunities and approaches to enable innovation in an organization.

In this section, we’ll cover a diverse set of innovation enablement capabilities that are worth discussing for their ability to either support the formulation or prioritization of ideas within your organization as far as they strengthen the ability to execute projects and products.

Ideation

Included in the ITBM product family is the Idea Portal. This is a tool that helps you efficiently source content from your organization and assess the potential of executing those projects. Even if the Idea Portal is not a good fit, the concept of centralizing the intake of helpful suggestions or ideas through demand management is something that can be incorporated into almost any service catalog. It also prevents the contamination of incident and service request data with a very different type of interaction where service stakeholders are suggesting ways to make a change to the service rather than interact with it operationally.

The value of implementing the Idea Portal or a demand management intake channel early in your implementation journey is that you can use it to help gather information relevant to your implementation as well. Similarly, the introduction of the demand process early in your implementation journey enables you to tie into the project management capabilities, which can help drive the execution of your ServiceNow implementation and other enterprise projects.

The management of ideas and demands therefore provides both direct benefits in the aggregation of knowledge within your organization and improvements to data quality in other processes that might otherwise serve as a channel for demand intake in the absence of a more suitable path.

Project management

Another significant challenge in modern organizations is a lack of standardization in the execution of projects, in large part due to the lack of widely adopted collaborative project delivery tooling. If your organization is still tracking risks and issues in Excel or PowerPoint, then you might consider the introduction of ServiceNow’s project management capability. One very effective way to pilot this is by adopting it for your own ServiceNow implementation, which has the added benefit of getting project participants more familiar with the tool and its features from an end user’s point of view.

Specific areas of value that can be piloted on your implementation before releasing it to the broader organization include the following:

• Online fully collaborative project planning and execution: Rather than a single project file on a manager’s computer, you can grant project participants a real-time capability to update their parts of the plan and review the progress of those they are dependent on.
• Transparency in risks, issues, decisions, actions, and changes: The online Risk, Issue, Decision, Action, Change (RIDAC) capabilities within ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management (PPM) help surface key project management risks and issues and provide a standard workflow for addressing them. They also serve to enable greater accountability, as all actions can be tracked and their status can be reported.
• Project status reporting: ServiceNow allows you to generate in-system status reports and share them with the right stakeholders. Relevant data on project progress and cost can be included to present a clear picture of progress.

In addition to facilitating project delivery, ServiceNow also offers a significant opportunity to accelerate technical execution through the inclusion of agile and test management capabilities directly on the platform. These features integrate into project planning as well, which facilitates even greater transparency and reduces the potential for missed communication.