ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

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ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (formerly ITBM) is a portfolio management tool that runs natively in ServiceNow’s Now platform. This suite of applications allows IT leaders and decision-makers to have better control in aligning strategy to work. With defined plans, aligned investments, and empowered teams, companies are able to deliver value fast and close the gap between strategy and delivery.

Table of Contents

ServiceNow SPM Review: Features and Strengths

Strategic Planning

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management includes several modular project capabilities. Primary among these is the Alignment Planner Workspace, which provides end-to-end planning tools to enable users to connect their business strategy to team execution. Users can create goals, prioritize initiatives and work items, plan, create dependencies, and track roadmaps. It supports both agile and traditional methods.

Features include a goals framework to help ensure teams support business outcomes and a planning tool that enables users to manage milestones at the project, demand, or epic levels. Users can visualize item dependencies to easily find and mitigate potential conflicts. The workspace also has ongoing progress monitoring and customizable roadmap views.

Project Portfolio Management

With SPM’s Project Portfolio Management capabilities, users can manage the entire project lifecycle across different technology and business portfolios. It provides the tools to align strategy, investment, and team structures with business goals. Users can easily adjust and adapt plans, manage hybrid ways of working and implement solutions faster.

Capabilities include top-down roadmap planning, an intuitive workspace UI, innovation management, and top-down funding allocation. It has multiple scenarios planning using what-if analysis, centralized demand management, and resource management. Users can also view everything from a single workbench, visualize KPIs and trends with dashboards and real-time reports, and manage on the go with mobile solutions.

Agile Development, SAFe, Release Management, and More

Strategic Portfolio Management enables companies to deliver value fast by enabling teams to work using the most effective methodologies. It supports agile development, which provides real-time visibility into product development. Users can track and orchestrate agile portfolio features and epics from a single view. It also streamlines the flow and processes so developers get more work done.

Other features include scrum program boards, agile dashboards, a unified backlog for both agile and traditional workstreams, and sprint tracking. SPM also supports the Scaled Agile Framework and has release management, built-in machine learning, and intelligent chatbot features that can serve as virtual agents.

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ServiceNow SPM Pricing

ServiceNow SPM pricing is a custom quote that requires a detailed evaluation of the unique needs of the customer. After this evaluation, the custom quote will include scalable packages for all stages of the company’s growth and flexible pricing tailored to the customer’s requirements.

The two packages are Standard and Professional. The Standard package includes 10 modules: Project Portfolio Management, Innovation Management, Demand Management, Resource Management, Release Management, Digital Portfolio Management, Alignment Planner Workspace, Scenario Planning, Mobile Applications, and Performance Analytics.

The Professional Package includes all modules in the Standard package with the addition of five modules: Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Investment Funding, Agile Development, Predictive Intelligence, and Virtual Agent.

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Who Uses ServiceNow SPM?

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is for mid-market to large enterprise companies in need of a solution to align strategy with work. It is for organizations that need to deliver work aligned with strategic outcomes across the enterprise, especially in highly disruptive business environments. Customers include Flight Centre, Deloitte, KAR Auction Services, Western & Southern Financial Group, Blackhawk Network, Wellstar, Finance of America, Sasol, and Lavazza Group.

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ServiceNow Supported Languages

By default, the platform supports American English. However, plugins for the following translations are available: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French Canada, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Thai, and Turkish.

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Case Studies

Bramley Maetsa is the Senior Manager of Business Enablement at an integrated energy and chemical company based in Johannesburg, South Africa. As a big organization, it had legacy issues, used many on-premise tools, and had poor visibility and access to company data. It was falling short of meeting customer needs.

Bramley’s team chose ServiceNow products including SPM to move faster, release new products quickly, and ensure that the products are stable and secure. In its implementation, SPM enables planners to prioritize projects based on available funding. It provides demand, investment, and project management capabilities that enables the company to generate a significant amount of savings, release a new product much quicker, and optimize its portfolio demand management.

Renato Baldo is the IT Budget Organization and Processing Manager at a large Italian coffee brand company. With the acquisition of several coffee companies across the globe, the number of its employees has doubled and the company’s expansion resulted in IT complexity. The company decided to improve its efficiency by adopting processes that would allow teams to manage more activities but require fewer resources to carry them out.

After its selection process, the company chose ServiceNow solutions including SPM. The first thing the company did was develop a portal based on SPM to manage IT projects and requests. It now handles requests relating to new IT solutions or enhancements of existing solutions, as well as the management of requests and its budget. SPM has enabled the company to achieve increased efficiency. Now Renato and his team knows what stage they are at in every project and can keep colleagues informed in a transparent manner.

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Why Choose ServiceNow SPM?

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is an enterprise-grade solution that supports a company’s digital transformation initiatives. It comes with a comprehensive set of software modules to help users digitally manage the different areas and aspects of project and portfolio management. Its intelligent, highly visual, and centralized tools enable managers to achieve strategic goals efficiently by improving project visibility, optimizing productivity, and increasing business resiliency.

To learn more about how ServiceNow SPM works with the ServiceNow platform, read our complete review.

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Company Info

ServiceNow is a publicly traded American company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and offices across North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It was founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy, who started with a vision to build a cloud-based platform that would enable regular people to route work effectively through the enterprise. Today, its platform and products help digitize and unify organizations to find smarter and better ways to make work flow.

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