Leading Bank Gains New Visibility With ServiceNow SPM

Assessing the needs

NTT DATA’s team of experienced ServiceNow advisors, process experts, implementation specialists and engagement managers worked with a leading provider of financial services to rural America on an initial assessment. By applying its Accelerated Agile Implementation Methodology, a quality, on-time, in-budget delivery and knowledge transfer was ensured. This process begins with creating an accurate picture of the current and desired future state within ServiceNow.

The Consulting Services team worked with the bank to:

• Assess the current ServiceNow platform
• Build a strategic ServiceNow roadmap for SPM including an organizational and governance structure to support future integrations
• Align processes to industry best practices
• Assist with organizational change management to support the rollout

Process mapping is a valuable activity to help an organization understand and optimize operations — who does what, and in what order — to identify roadblocks, areas of improvement, and unnecessary steps. The bank examined its processes to align with industry best practices, ensure efficiencies and to take advantage of areas ripe for automation with ServiceNow.

The development of a ServiceNow roadmap helped identify those capabilities that were critical to support near-term business goals and those that could wait until later. For example, the team determined that estimating the cost of work was not essential to helping focus or direct the work, so that capability was turned off for the initial rollout.

A shared strategic vision

Going into the project, the bank’s enterprise program and project management team and IT teams relied on a significant number of tools and manual workflows to track demand and work — spreadsheets, email, Clarity schedules and SharePoint websites. For any new project or program, the intake process included carefully documenting the needs with scoping and description components. However, the intake process was very compartmentalized, and it was difficult to see work at an aggregate level. In addition, there was a lack of visibility into available resources and resource deployment.

The team looked to ServiceNow’s SPM to guide end-to-end planning, help capture and assess demand, see staff capacity through resource management and effective time tracking, as well as management of demands and projects from a single workspace. At one level, this enabled the bank’s IT Services team to easily assess and communicate its available capacity. At a higher level, it also gave the team the ability to prioritize projects from an enterprise-level view of business needs and to share real-time information with project teams and with executives.

As they mature their processes and capabilities on the ServiceNow platform, the organization expects greater levels of visibility which will translate to better operational efficiencies and decision-making capabilities.

Managed rollout

Organizational change management (OCM) is key to getting the most out of a ServiceNow implementation. Coaching people to change how they work can take time even when the tool is compelling. To effectively manage the resistance to change, the bank focused on the improvements the new tools delivered, including:

• Automations to enhance workflows
• More transparency over projects and tasks
• Fewer documents or artifacts created per project
• Less meetings and greater self-service capabilities to update work status and availability

The bank leveraged automations to log hours based on user role, group or location. This reduced how often an employee or manager had to manually record events while providing more accurate data on activities.

Solution deployment took a minimum viable product approach to its rollout, focusing first on resource management, getting the base level of information into the system and ensuring that incoming data was actionable. Over time, the team has been incrementally adding SPM capabilities to accommodate the natural resistance to change.

Supporting Agile development with portfolios

As the bank built excitement for SPM and crowdsourced pain points, teams that follow the Agile framework were the first to volunteer. Those Agile teams have begun using SPM to build initial pipelines and backlogs using demand intake and working through SPM alongside other development tools in their environment. They are also expanding their scope to include portfolios to define and visualize plans and make adjustments to support the Agile development process.

Supporting enterprise portfolio management with simple, transparent reporting

ServiceNow’s SPM integrates with existing scheduling systems and the Agile framework to provide visibility over work in progress. Work is prioritized, scheduled and completed as needs evolve. The team collects valuable data on how time is allocated and on which efforts, making it easier to plan future work. Reports on time tracking, projects and demands help the team define and fund projects and articulate resource plans.

The team uses SPM’s reporting capabilities to create presentations without wasting time collating data or manually creating reports. It can now present project and portfolio performance at an executive level through ServiceNow dashboards, without needing to create multiple PowerPoints and charts.

With its implementation of ServiceNow’s SPM, the bank now has a true enterprise-capable platform with the tools in place to deliver a shared vision of streamlined operations that align available resources and schedules to its strategic goals.