ServiceNow Partner Perspective - Part 6: Essential Strategies for Strategic Portfolio Management

Luckily, with Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) from ServiceNow, you can empower your teams to achieve more, closing the gap between strategy and delivery. Let’s explore three essential ways you can utilize SPM to drive business outcomes and achieve success.

A Definition of Strategic Portfolio Management

Before we dive into how to use SPM, let’s establish what it is. Formerly known as IT Business Management, SPM focuses on selecting and prioritizing projects that will best enable you and your team to achieve a defined set of goals. This means anticipating critical business requirements, allocating resources, and evaluating the value of your project portfolio. It also means adapting rapidly to change so you can consistently deliver more value.

Here are just a few of the tasks you can manage through ServiceNow SPM:

• Organizational alignment with business priorities
• Enterprise scaling
• Synchronizing epics across platforms
• Project management through an interactive project workspace
• Resource management
• Enhanced visibility across all projects

At the end of the day, SPM is about making sure your actions are supporting your business goals. Because what’s the point of investing time and money in your processes without ensuring they’re effective?

Prioritize Visibility into Processes

The most important way to ensure you take full advantage of SPM is to make sure that leaders have full visibility into all processes, goals, and features. First, you should proactively identify constraints in your enterprise. Knowing and hopefully removing these helps leaders identify risks more easily so they can allocate resources and responsibilities to those best qualified for each task. Without this visibility, it’s challenging—if not impossible—to determine the best steps, let alone drive the change you need to thrive and continuously achieve results.

ServiceNow’s dashboards give you visibility to develop a comprehensive roadmap and drive continuous improvement for years to come. By consistently prioritizing a full picture of what your team is accomplishing and what you’d like to achieve next, you can make sure nothing goes unnoticed.

Develop Adaptive, Change-Focused Culture

Visibility isn’t the end of the story, though. Your team must also be able to adapt anything that isn’t working to achieve your business goals. This means saying goodbye to rigid planning and adopting a flexible, adaptive, change-focused approach that allows leaders to allocate resources, roles, and responsibilities according to changing customer needs and market conditions.

But, it’s also important not to drive so much change that it becomes too much. Organizations must know how to handle change management effectively to avoid overwhelming their team. Here are a few tips to make sure you drive a positive, change-enabled culture at your organization.

Ask for Feedback

Communication between business leaders, managers, and end users is key to making sure you aren’t driving too much change at once. Ask for surveys, collect qualitative data, and host roundtable discussions regularly and encourage anyone and everyone to participate.

Establish a Roadmap for Change

When you identify a good opportunity for change, how will you ensure it happens efficiently and effectively? Be sure to define a process for how you will handle change management moving forward so that when the time arises, you’ll know what to do. Who will oversee next steps? How will you ensure executive support and approval?

Empower Your Workforce

Don’t forget about your people. What are you doing to ensure they have the support they need to handle change effectively? It’s up to you to provide the environment for success without overwhelming your team.

Remember, success is not defined by achieving your goals straightaway. It’s determined by a growth mindset that allows you to grow, treat mistakes as opportunities, and pivot as necessary. SPM from ServiceNow provides your team with the foundation to engage in these goals.

Focus on the Customer Experience

Last but certainly not least, SPM can help your organization ensure the customer experience is at the forefront of your strategies—so make sure to prioritize it. Without considering customer objectives, it’s easy to end up investing in initiatives that may lead to less ROI or revenue.

First, identify internal and external customers, their needs and wants, and which of these are most important to them. Then, use that information to compare your own initiatives with their demands. For example, you could include leaders from various functions of your organization to identify what they think are the most valuable ideas, then bring those to executives for them to make an unbiased decision that aligns strategic goals with action.

Excel with Support from ServiceNow Elite Partner, Crossfuze

Do you want complete access to a host of platform expertise? If you’re searching for a ServiceNow Partner that will help you drive digital transformation and achieve your goals, Crossfuze is a ServiceNow Elite Partner, making it a top 1 percent partner for delivering long-term, consistent success globally. Reach out to us at LetsTalk@crossfuze.com to learn more.