Implementation of the ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management Suite (PPM)

The customer, a major IT service provider, supports companies in the financial and insurance sector with comprehensive IT solutions based on state-of-the-art standardized technologies, from classic to cloud and to mainframe. Services such as compliance, provider management, transition, transformation, consulting and networking are also offered. The IT service portfolio is continuously being expanded to include new topics such as cloud services and DevOps, always in line with the regulatory requirements for banks and insurance companies. The diverse customer landscape, the large product portfolio and constant new IT requirements ensure that the project business flourishes.

When implementing the PPM Suite, the customer was looking for a partner who was familiar with the company's project business and at the same time had experience in ServiceNow implementations. exccon had already worked with the customer for many years, particularly in the area of project management, and was one of the first ServiceNow partners in German-speaking countries. In addition, exccon has many years of expertise as training company and was also able to competently take over the employee training, which was part of the project.

The numerous projects presented our customer with major challenges. There was no overall view of the complete resource utilization in the company. Inadequate coordination of resources between operations and projects posed major challenges, especially for project managers. In addition, company-wide standards and guidelines relating to project management led to a high level of manual maintenance of project documents. The need to create extensive status reports cost project managers a lot of time. The introduction of a tool should remedy this: the ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Suite, which should be integrated into the customer's existing ServiceNow instance. ServiceNow PPM enables cross-departmental and efficient planning and management of personnel deployment. In addition, project participants save a lot of time by automating a wide range of project management processes.

As a first step, the requirements were defined as part of a joint gap workshop. From the customer side, project managers as well as representatives from resource, project portfolio and quality management took part in order to ensure a holistic view of the issue. During this workshop, it became clear that the initial release would not implement the entire PPM suite, but would instead focus on project and resource management.

Exccon then transferred the requirements as user stories into a product backlog and estimated the implementation effort.

Development was agile: there was regular exchange in daily standups, sprint reviews and sprint planning. The implementation of the user stories was shared between the customer and exccon. exccon was particularly responsible for the implementation of the interface to SAP and the role and authorization concept in ServiceNow.

In order to familiarize the project staff with the new tool, exccon created appropriate training materials. These explained what needs to be done in ServiceNow for each project phase. Tips and tricks for using ServiceNow were also provided.

After the go-live, exccon naturally supported the customer company in a hypercare phase and continued support.

• Saving time by automating various project management processes, eliminating manual tasks
• Management of all projects in the company in one tool
• Managing the entire project life cycle from idea to execution in one tool
• Cross-departmental and efficient planning and management of personnel deployment, resulting in better resource utilization
• Automated reporting
• Reduced maintenance effort for project documents
• Implementation close to out-of-the-box standards, making system maintenance easy