What needs improvement with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?

If we have enough information, we can address issues from the cloud to the top level of the organization. This allows us to see if our resources are being allocated properly from an executive perspective. Their packages often include advanced features, typically offered in Standard, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. New or advanced features are usually available only in the Professional and Enterprise packages, which require customers to pay significantly more.

ServiceNow need to focus on internal empowerment rather than awareness to drive the change. Previously, our company depended on external parties to handle incidents. We are taking ownership of incident management, and everyone is aligned with this shift. Our IT team, service management, security managers, and others are committed to ensuring reliability and business continuity.

The main challenge we face with SPM is its flexibility, which can sometimes lead to lengthy discussions and slow down implementation. As for improvements, integrating IT finance management tools like AppTio or Nearos would be beneficial. We already have data mining capabilities, but continuous updates and enabling of new features would be great, considering the rapid pace of DevOps advancements in the market. In terms of forward-looking analytics and comparison to tools like Power BI, there are areas that could be enhanced, especially in drill-down reporting.

SPM is definitely strong for project management, but its finance capabilities are not as robust. While there is a separate Financial Management product, it would be beneficial to have more out-of-the-box support for finance integrations within SPM. I’m not suggesting replacing systems like SAP for finance, but there should be better support for financial integrations. Currently, connecting to SaaS solutions is complicated, and getting into detailed financial calculations is challenging. Forecasting is manageable, but handling actual financials is not as straightforward. The finance area needs improvement, specifically making finance application integrations easier. Generic finance capabilities should be more user-friendly and integrated into SPM. Although they have started this journey, it hasn’t been fully released yet. There seems to be a roadmap, and once complete, it will be very useful. Additionally, incorporating a Q&A feature for entire strategies or project demands and enhancing text analytics within SPM would be beneficial.

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management must improve its interface, which is not very interactive or user-friendly compared to other tools like Zendesk. The real-time reporting feature doesn't help much in our decision-making process. It's quite complex to use and lacks the rich features needed for visualization. Overall, I find it to be very poor.

The configurations are fine, but the user interface could be improved. ServiceNow generally introduces a lot of new user interfaces, workspaces, and other features. There is room for improvement, especially in bringing certain information together, such as persona-based information. Certain prebuilt configurations or dashboards could also help speed up the deployment of this service. The technical support could be improved.

Test Management is not done at a granular level. I prefer using Jira. The product does not give us the freedom to capture all the instances, test cases, and evidence. There are multiple things that a tester has to capture for the test that is being performed. However, I think the product keeps improving. I spoke to a service person who told me that these features would be added to the next version.

They could work on their templates. Many of them need some improvement. There are fewer templates available right now. We need help from other tools. If we had more templates, it would make things easier. If you want to opt for a Waterfall model, there should be relevant templates to help create project plans faster. The user interface could be more modern. We'd like it to be easier to understand without having to reach out to ServiceNow. It should be easier to find the steps to use the modules. It would be ideal if they had guides for creating projects and/or templates.

The portfolio management tool is not as good as DevOps or Jira because it requires a Russian site and BitLocker to train users or run projects.

The interface is cluttered with a lot of names and areas. It may not be user friendly enough for a first timer. He or she may not be able to see or understand or remember what's the difference between clicking the safe button in a ticket or safe and exit or the other buttons. They could provide a lot more description to each button, then the user could figure out how to use it properly themselves instead of clicking the wrong buttons. The way the interface is designed, sometimes it's not straightforward or easy for me to perform a calculation of statistics (calculation on how many incidents tickets are relevant to certain expert) and I may have to manually open all the tickets and add the numbers up on my own to analyze the statistics. I will have to use the human efforts to maybe reach all the subjects and all the contents of the tickets to be able to produce a report to sub total how many similar cases has happened for certain issue and to given clear picture of what has happened in one year's time with the other IT support activities. There should be a way to automate this process.

A major improvement we would like to see is definitely around agile management. They have improved over the last many years, in all fairness, yet there are many things they can do from an agile and scrum management perspective. What is challenging for us is managing the finance. We still depend upon our classic Oracle NetSuite for many of these financial planning and organizing. While many features exist in ServiceNow, it is not far along with what we have in the Oracle world. Predominantly, we have to manually write the scripts and all the custom rules for much of the whole financial annual planning and monthly planning. It's not out-of-the-box. There's a lot of customization, so I'll have to buy an expensive product like ServiceNow and then have a tech deck for it. I'll have to keep a big developer team on staff to build these things out. One of the things they should definitely change is the number of out-of-the-box options. The native feature that comes with this financial planning is something that needs to change. For example, if I have to see some of these permutations and combinations, like how I see them on a spreadsheet, I should be able to import them. Everybody doesn't log into the portal. I need to figure out: how can I do it manually, upload it, and then have the XLSM take these macros and run? That is the one automation I would definitely like to see. The finance teams, they're well-versed in using Excel. I cannot go and insist to them that they should start using my folders. I would love to see some compatibility where we could have something like a spreadsheet in Excel and then put it onto ServiceNow and have it reflected.

The price keeps going up, and to remain competitive, it needs to have a competitive edge. I would like to see more of the latest innovations, in terms of AI, ML, and all of the latest cutting-edge technologies, included in the platform.

The solution needs a few things in terms of resource management. It still lags behind some of the company leaders like Workday. It's not yet there yet. The solution, currently, whatever it is, it's very concrete. Customizing it is a bit of a tedious task. That's the one thing I pretty much feel is a downside. The initial setup is complex.

We track salaries or paychecks of the resources. They change from time to time, such as every six months or every year. If they can come up with a default or out-of-the-box feature to manage those multiple payable costs so that we can automatically calculate the project costs rolled up. That would be the coolest feature that we can expect from ServiceNow. We would like to have an automatic feature to manage the payable costs. We should be able to manage or maintain multiple pay costs so that while calculating the project roll-up costs for individual projects, the respective pay costs in a particular period are picked up automatically from the backend. Currently, we have to customize that. It is doable. We have done it but through customization. If it can be part of the out-of-the-box functionality, it would be great. It will save a lot of time for partners like us. It will also be beneficial for customers.

It could be more user-friendly.

ServiceNow IT Business Management could improve by adding better artificial intelligence.

Import of really big project (hundreds of tasks) done in MSProject, we face some problems with dependencies and subtasks. Also, currently the 'percent complete' field is purely duration-based, therefore the presence of parallel workstreams limits the usefulness of that metric, since the amount of work being performed every day could be widely varying. An useful metric to be developed would be a 'percent work complete', such as the one available by default in Microsoft Project.

ServiceNow needs to invest more in integration. That's the only thing. It could always extend its portfolio a little bit. It doesn't have to extend too far. In some other areas, like enterprise architecture, they already have the tools for it.

I would like to see some artificial intelligence incorporated into the management functions. The initial setup is complex and should be simplified.

One of the key areas important to me is the reporting side. The dashboard interface is limited functionally and is not very user friendly or particularly intuitive so that, for example, if you want to combine or correlate incidents with relevant changes for a report, it's not easily done and makes reporting difficult. It's a gap in the solution. What I do now is take the data from ServiceNow and put it in Power BI for visualizing and for combining data analysis because ServiceNow doesn't give me that option. Also, the performance on the test boarding in my view is quite slow - every time that you change something in the automatic report, your interaction in building the dashboards is really horrible. For additional features, I think we are now implementing our own chat bot, so they should do a lot more on visualization. I would prefer to have a really nice interface into Power BI if their test board is not up to it.

The solution is quite extensive, and I’ve only used the sections related to project management. I’m not sure if it was lacking any features. For me, it had everything I needed. I’ve never experienced any technical issues at all. The only issue for us is the pricing. It’s quite high in comparison with the competition.

The program isn't very user-friendly, as it is rather difficult to use. However, it could be the way it was configured in the company I worked for, so I cannot be sure because I don't have any other references.

The cost could be improved. The solution is quite pricey. The solution should have the capacity to integrate with the latest promotion of MES projects. Right now it's not working so well.

The timing reporting module, and how it's used is a bit difficult to understand. Everything related to project management is quite extensive. It needs to be simplified. At first, our users didn't want to use it, because it seems a bit complex.