33: Syncing with ServiceNow: ServiceNow Named a Worldwide Leader in Two IDC MarketScapes for Value Stream Management and Strategic Portfolio Management

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Andy Whiteside: Hello, everyone! Welcome to Episode 33 of syncing with service. Now I’m your host, Andy. Why, said I’ve got Mike Savia from Zentra and Eddie Mcdonald from Zintega on. It’s april 20, s, 2024. I’ll hit the guys with the commercial real quick, or the listeners with the commercial guys. If you’re working with service now

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Andy Whiteside: and you wanna get more out of the platform, you’re not getting what you expected to get out of the platform. You you feel like your partner is not adding the value or even service now, cause it’s a lot to do. Nobody can do it by themselves. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we do this podcast proactively. That’s why we try to get front of these conversations. And

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Andy Whiteside: you know, I think we’re the right people to help a lot of people. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people.

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Andy Whiteside: doing some, you know, unique things like this podcast. And we’re, I think we’re probably 30 gonna be like 40 customers going to service. Now, it looks like a knowledge here in a couple of weeks so super proud of that. Eddie, start with you this time. How’s it going.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: It’s going really well. And I’m super excited about today’s topic, because this is my sweet spot. This is where I live and breathe.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. So, Mike, you gonna you gonna take that, you gonna let Eddie steal the show.

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Mike Sabia: I’m always supporting Eddie Sailor’s show. He’s great.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright that that makes it easy. Alright! Let me

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Andy Whiteside: You share my screen here. So you guys can see what I’m talking about and highlighting the the blog for today. We we are borrowing from the service. Now, website is idc marketscape. I’m not sure what idc market scape is, you guys can explain it. Name service. Now, a leader in Spm

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Andy Whiteside: strategic portfolio management and value stream management. Let’s kinda jump in here, Mike, do you. Wanna just kinda you know what, Eddie, you’re the subject matter expert, I think, for today we’ll see right? We’ll challenge you on that. First of all. What is idc markets Cape all about? Oh, by the way, this blog is from oh, man, you have Boaz from March nineteenth of this year.

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Andy Whiteside: Eddie. What? What is the Idc marketplace? To begin with.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: It’s it’s just another magic quadrant type of ranking system out there. It’s I mean, there’s a bunch of them out there. This just happens to be Idc, so it’s just they. They look at all the functionality, the different platforms and and the benefits and the cost and all of that and market share, then they then they kind of quantify, you know, who’s the best, and service now is generally the top quadrant, and all of these type of assessments.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, so you could see him up in the upper right corner. you have probably did what I would do, which was maybe take a screenshot of the the image that he wanted to post up here. So in the blog, and when I zoom in it doesn’t really come in real good, but it’s a service. Now, open text.

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Andy Whiteside: What are the other ones up there with them? Sap is close.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah, I can’t really read that.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, we’ll we’ll we’ll figure that a little more as we do this. Okay? So the the introduction now to service, now, as a leader in the Idc market scape. So this magic quadrant regarding as worldwide strategic portfolio management is in there and value stream management is Eddie

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Andy Whiteside: define in layman’s terms what? We’re strategic portfolio management is.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You know, service now is exceptional at naming things. That’s what they’re really good at. And the name really says it. All strategic portfolio management. We all have projects. We all have initiatives, and these can get these can get piled in. There can be a lot.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So what we need to do is understand? Where’s the business value for these projects or initiatives? What’s the cost? What’s the timeline? What resources do we need? What is gonna be the ultimate impact. You know, what’s the valid business case

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: so to manage this backlog of projects or initiatives. Service now has a very clear path through them through ideation and demand management into projects and and all of that, and we use spm internally to run our service now projects. So we’re very familiar with this, but at its at its core.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: It helps you strategically manage the projects or initiatives that are in your queue, that best serve your business.

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Andy Whiteside: So every time. Sorry. Good, Mike, yeah.

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Mike Sabia: I was just to say, you know, part of strategic portfolio management, you know, project portfolio management fits within that managing an individual project. But when you have the ideation, you have the demands you’re trying to figure out, hey? What do we want to accomplish? And you do those those business cases to say, Hey, this is how much is gonna cost. This is how much, how long it’s gonna take. And here, this is the value of

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Mike Sabia: project. Then

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Mike Sabia: your CC levels can look at that and say, Hey, well, this is great, which is which one’s gonna be the quickest which one fits within our budget for this year, and they can choose that and prioritize the appropriate ones. That’s where the strategic comes into play.

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Andy Whiteside: So, Mike, every time I hear spm, I hear project management. What? What other things do you do with spm beyond project, management.

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Mike Sabia: Well, you know a any

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Mike Sabia: well, let me start with project management with project. It’s it’s managing the project. You know what resources come into play, and you could start that before it becomes a project, when it’s still a demand. You could say, Hey, this is how much it would take. This is how many people this is, how much time dollars, and so forth, and then that can roll up into the project so you can get a sense of of what’s necessary.

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Mike Sabia: strategic portfolio management really takes it at that next level. Some, the things that we just discussing you know, the relative comparison you talk about. You know.

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Mike Sabia: What is the cost? What’s the duration? But then, what’s the value it? And they, and just like with Idc, where they have a quadrant. You have a quadrant and strategic port management, where you’d see you know the the time to value, whether it is high value, low value the risk associated that in order to understand, you know

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Mike Sabia: where you want to go strategically with your organization.

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Andy Whiteside: At what point do you start to measure? And monitor the value you’re getting out of these things, is it here in spm, or is it this other piece or value.

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Mike Sabia: That’s that’s we start getting into value stream management. So with value stream management, you are looking at all of the aspects of that project. So you start talking about, hey? You know.

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Mike Sabia: what are the Kpis that we’re gonna manage? You know, we wanna talk about how long it takes for us to

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Mike Sabia: do training. How long it does takes us to do this or that, and if you could start benchmarking them and using some of the benchmarking tools that service now provides, you’re able to make a value decisions. What’s the the value of the project to the organization.

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Andy Whiteside: So I bet most companies think they have some kind of handle on project management, and what falls under the spm bucket, but I would hope most would admit they have no real understanding of the value of what they own in terms of portfolio. I would have to say, most people don’t

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Andy Whiteside: don’t feel like they have a handle on that. At least, I’ve never not seen much of it.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You. You know the interesting piece around both of these is what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t take in politics. It doesn’t take in squeaky wheels, loud voices. It is purely what is the business case, and that is why I love it. I’ve been involved in so many very large organizations implementing the wrong thing because the wrong voices are the loudest. So this removes that.

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Andy Whiteside: That’s that’s really important, no doubt.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. So the first after the intro here, the first breakout section says, visibility for decision making confidence, Eddie. I think that’s kind of what you’re just talking about. Can you kind of summarize?

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Andy Whiteside: You know what this section the blog is saying.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Sure. I mean, if you skip down to the bullet points, I mean fund. What matters most? You know what? As Mike was saying, we need to prioritize on a number of different metrics. What are the cost? How long is it? Gonna take the resources? Is, are they external or internal resources. So we wanna fund what’s gonna matter? The most to our business? Maybe that’s the most expensive project. Maybe it’s the it’s not.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: But it’s gonna give us that vis visibility, and then, you know, build a roadmap to guide these investments. What are we gonna do in which order to build upon them each other we get again. Service now is all about communication. That’s kind of that’s its thing. We break down those silos. We can openly see between teams what’s happening. And the order that we’re gonna do those?

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So yeah, that mean the decision-making confidence is all. As as Mike said, it’s all about the strategy part.

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Andy Whiteside: So, Mike it it jumps into things like process, mining and benchmarks and generative AI! Where do those pop out in this.

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Mike Sabia: Well, so when you’re looking, you know

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Mike Sabia: a little more abstractly at an organization, you might say, Hey, this tool could make this better. That’s that’s awesome. But there might be another thing that is even worse. And sometimes you need to build that up first.

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Mike Sabia: and because it it, maybe the solution isn’t perfect, but it’s gonna have that much of a greater impact.

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Mike Sabia: And so when you’re looking at

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Mike Sabia: the the the

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Mike Sabia: consistent interface for your your your employees, you know. If if people are happy with the tools, then they’re gonna be happy to work with you if they’re frustrated, the tools I’ve been in situations where I’ve left the company because I hated the tools, and I felt I wasn’t enabled. So you’re not just looking at, hey? What’s the Kpi of, you know the timeline, but it’s also, hey? Let’s make sure we have a great experience for our users. What’s you know? How do products interface with each other. Is it a consistent interface? You know what’s the workflow with the integration.

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Mike Sabia: scalability? And when you start talking about those aspects, then you can have a whole view of of what you’re trying to accomplish.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I like to kind of measure myself. What did I get done at the end of the week?

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Andy Whiteside: And you definitely don’t want the tools to be a prohibitor. You wanted to be an enabler, and

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Andy Whiteside: that’s where service now seems to be the answer.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. Next, session says, value delivery and compliance at scale. Eddie, what are they trying to cover here.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So E. The compliance part is the important part of here. So we all know that service now is built itel compliant out of the box. But there’s also a number of other compliance pieces here. So the you know service now has their own implementation framework called safe, called service. Now, adaptive implementation framework. So if we’re doing multiple projects over a large group of folks.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: we need to make sure that things are happening that are all compliant. We’re following best practice. We’re we’re managing our risk, you know, if we’re making changes. So the compliance part and the visibility is, I think, the really big takeaway from this section.

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Andy Whiteside: So my when they say at scale, does that? I mean there’s to do this. But.

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Mike Sabia: Right? W, one thing you wanna I I all absolutely wanted to point out in this podcast. Is that you know, there’s a lot of point solutions out there for project management.

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Mike Sabia: and but that the beauty that service now has is, it has that single PIN of class across the whole thing. If you have a project and you have a resource, you need schedule, but that resource is supporting operations. You can see what their availability is. If you have a project, and you need to schedule a change. You schedule the change within service. Now you have that that scale within the product.

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Andy Whiteside: And that’s becoming more and more valuable across enterprises of all sizes.

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Andy Whiteside: And I think they’re starting to realize that that’s why you know, service. Now, as a platform is winning out over individual products, it might be great at their product.

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Andy Whiteside: But where does that come in as far as you scale it across the environment. Well, that means a lot of point solutions.

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Andy Whiteside: Eddie, they wrap it up with innovation, innovating for the future. What are they trying to say.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You know, the Gen. AI piece is always part of the conversation here, and you know, as a as a very basic example, you know we have predicted AI, which looks at what happened in the past. Predictable happen in the future. The generative AI is looking at what’s happening now, and as a great example. Since we’re talking about project, you might have an engagement manager that is keeping a bunch of different notes, and the the Gen. AI can complete

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: those notes for you in a very clear, succinct way. It can also create status reports for your customers to see internal or external. So the Gen. AI. Pieces across the service. Now, Platform, excuse me, are really exceptional, but this, these are billable resources, and if we can leverage Gen. AI to save those resources. Good for the company. It’s good for the customers.

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Andy Whiteside: No.

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Andy Whiteside: Mike, thoughts on this.

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Mike Sabia: E. Exactly, and and that could touch any aspects. You know, we’ve talked previously about customer service management, how you can have Gen. AI summarize a ticket. So if somebody, you know, just gets added ticket rather than having to read all the notes, you have a summarization of the ticket. If we are. One portion of spm is is agile

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Mike Sabia: development which they mentioned in this article, and if you can use a generate AI to assist in creation of your stories. If you can have Gen. AI, you know, summarize what you’re gonna accomplish, or maybe maybe, you know, create some intelligent acceptance material or test scripts.

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Mike Sabia: That is, part of spm that enables the customer to have a great experience.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay. Guys, how much of this type of stuff do you expect to see a knowledge in 2 weeks?

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Mike Sabia: A lot I mean, service now is is focus. You know. They’re going jumping into lake with all their clothes on. For gen AI, and I I expect to hear quite a bit.

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Mike Sabia: Don’t.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: And and it wouldn’t be such a big topic if it wasn’t good for the customers and good for our customers. Customers, you know there’s value in this, I mean. But there was value before Gen. AI. Now it’s really just turbocharged

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: down.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, that the this data, this platform, this, the the portfolio, this the very. The platform brings it, plus the data, is just gonna enable all the value of the same to to exponentially make more sense again, as customers scale the platform across their

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Andy Whiteside: different departments. Not just the origin that we started here with, IT,

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Andy Whiteside: yeah, right? Absolutely

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Andy Whiteside: sorry, Eddie, yeah, absolutely good. Thank you. Guys appreciate the time today. And look forward to talking to you between now and and knowledge, and then we’ll do. Probably some post knowledge discussion like this can be awesome.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Love it.

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Andy Whiteside: You guys, thanks.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Thanks.