ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Reviews

We use the solution for strategic management. We use the solution to plan the organization level to plan the overall picture or the KPI of the organization. Then, they decide on the management and the department's projects or department resources to align with their organization's directions.

Information management is very beneficial for our customers.

If the customer has accurate information and the vendor implements it correctly, the customer should gain a clear overview of their organization's strategic direction and current performance. If they need to adjust resources or focus more on dynamic KPIs, using the appropriate tools will make this process more convenient. They can review the planned outcomes they aim to achieve in their projects or KPIs and compare them to the results.

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.

I have been using ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management as a reseller for one year. We use the latest version of the solution.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

It is suitable for medium enterprises. Everything tends to work well for the customer if it's properly configured and implemented and the right information is provided to the system.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. I rate it a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The pricing is average. They always have some extra options to add.

I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

In SysML solutions, it's common for this to be just one module. When used with other modules in ServiceNow, they can function as a unified platform for the organization. All the data is in the same data model, making it easy to use other modules and expand across the organization.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for map planning. For a particular year, we look at different needs, initiatives or programs, and associated projects. 

We also use the solution for tool management and determining how a resource such as a thermostat will be used across different projects. 

We have 2,000 to 3,000 users throughout our company. 

The demand management tool is very strategic because it helps assess risk, gives you a visual of different demands, and rates those values. It provides a fairly good assessment in a bubble chart. 

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. 

I have been using the solution for 18 months. 

The solution seems fairly stable because we have a release cycle. I rate stability a seven out of ten because there is an upgrade every six months. If you decide to go for the upgrade, then everyone goes through a level of change. 

The scalability is dependent on having the right data model in place. The CSVM is the common services data module. The moment you unlock CSVM, you can leverage it across departments.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

Technical support is very supportive. If there is a challenging case, then they work around the clock to solve it. They are good at choosing the right priority between two issues. 

The out-of-the-box setup is straightforward if you follow the guide. 

We used third-party consultants for our implementation. A dedicated, three-member team can deploy in one or two weeks.

It takes two or three days to get the hang of things such as creating projects and moving through different stages. 

Some of our users have trouble creating their own reports. You have to create a room and be a bit knowledgeable about underlying tables and values to make reports. 

The licensing is based on metrics and is tailored to customer's needs. Pricing depends on how you negotiate licenses. The cost charged to you might not be the same as the cost charged to me. 

The pricing is rated a three out of ten because the solution is more expensive than other products. 

The solution depends on a layer of engagement or action as opposed to a system of record. It is strategic portfolio management so doesn't necessarily comprehend or solve problems by itself. Other tools like IIM and HRSD have a bigger capacity to solve problems. 

I definitely recommend the solution if you want to expand projects across your entire organization, have clear visibility of progress, and learn your investments.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Predominantly, we used to have something like Clarity in the past to maintain our project portfolio management, our demand management, and agility management. However, we were not too happy with the analytics and the dashboards in the past with the Clarity product, their PPM product. That is when we migrated to ServiceNow. The main use case predominantly concerns demand management, forecasting, and portfolio management. The whole ITBM right now is also known as Strategic Portfolio Management. It's the whole portfolio across the practice as an entire thing managed through that. It's our whole go-to platform for managing merger planning. It is an enterprise agile planning tool.

The most important feature for us is project portfolio management. That helps us manage and track the entire life cycle of a project or a program at an enterprise scale and across business portfolios. That has been the key differentiator which we use from the product. 

To look at the whole demand management perspective, now we are spread across the globe. We might have different demands coming in from the India region, from UK, APAC, US, et cetera. With this, we can figure out how to manage and forecast the whole business demand. That has been another major use case for us from a demand management perspective. 

The resource manager is useful. If we know the demand, we know the business, how do we tie that up with resource ramp-up, ramp-down? It is not just about a few FTEs. This also includes expanding to an ODC, looking at what we can track, and seeing our resource availability and allocation according to skills, geographies, and levels. The whole resource management has been very helpful in visualizing resources. 

There's lots of innovation within the product itself.

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. 

I've been dealing with the solution for about five years now.

The product is stable. Once we have all the initial glitches and migration issues resolved, it's fairly stable. The product challenges we face are not from a whole platform perspective. It's only a customization perspective. Therefore, if I have customized more than a particular set of requirements, it takes a bit of time. If it's out of the box, I don't have to customize anything, and I'm ready to go. However, whilst we're customizing, the platform wouldn't be that stable.

ServiceNow, every six months, launches a new release, a major release. What happens is when the new release comes, for me to upgrade and transition to the new one takes a long time due to my heavy customization. 

From an availability perspective, is stable. However, from a service availability, that upgrade cycle is usually much longer whenever we have to upgrade. 

The scalability is straightforward. You can scale up and down. That should not be a problem.

We do a true-up every month. We know how many licenses we are using. We are in total control of the ramp-up and ramp-down. We are good with that.

We have between 50 to 100 people on the solution. 

I would love it if folks used it daily; however, they login in once a month for the monthly and fortnightly reports. The number of diligent users would be about 20 users. They use it for finance, procurement, and all these things.

We also use Jir, which does an interesting job as well.

The business angle is well defined in ServiceNow products. Azure DevOps or other things are moving from a technical to a semi-technical area, where I cannot bring my business or financial teams to log in and get that focus. The biggest differentiator compared to other options is that it's predominantly from a persona approach. I can actually personify my platform for technical teams, semi-technical teams, and business teams. That has been the biggest value differentiator compared to other tools like Atlassian, maybe Clarity, or even Azure DevOps. 

On the flip side, when I go to my technical teams, they would love to, obviously, log in only to an Azure DevOps or Jira option. 

The initial setup was fairly complex.

We thought we could have everything ready in six to eight weeks' time. However, it literally took us almost six months.

In all fairness, there are some things we also realized afterward. We are premium partners. We realized that, while we say out-of-the-box, it is not actually out-of-the-box. If you are staffing an organization from scratch, it is okay. However, we were already using Clarity and, obviously, spreadsheets. One of the issues which we face was a mindset from people who suddenly had to start using it when they already had methods. 

Discounting that fact itself, many of the customizations and all those modules, configurations, parallel runs, and then going live and cutting over took us more than we thought. 

The configuration of the product takes time. What happens is, while ServiceNow claims everything is out-of-the-box and everything can be easily achieved, many times, for some customizations, we had to raise a ticket with the actual ISVs, or the vendors and then add that. And we have an in-house ServiceNow team. We are not beginners.

We know ServiceNow pretty well. In spite of that, if you have to refer to ServiceNow, it means it's still not that user-friendly compared to others. They're in that space, they're evolving. However, it's more from the configuration perspective where you run into issues. I'd rate the initial setup at a or 2.5 to three out of five. It's not easy. There's a moderate amount of difficulty. 

The ROI is quite high as I can have my team members all on one portal. 

With this product, I have a unified integrated view across geography, across teams, and that helps. That itself allows them to collaborate together. Apart from that, from an ROI perspective, some of our planning and forecasting have been much more streamlined. If you look at ROI from that perspective, it's high.

I'd rate the ROI at a four out of five. It's quite good. 

Since we are a managed service provider, we buy it annually. 

While we might charge back to the business and charge back to our end. We also have some business people, consumers, and customers. For them, we do it monthly. From our direct contracting perspective with ServiceNow, it's an annual fee.

The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually. 

We use the high-end version; we don't use a standard version. We have many other integration hubs and other things, so it's a bundled product.

From a dollar-to-dollar comparison, they're expensive. They're actually more expensive than, probably, Clarity. They're actually more expensive than whatever you have from a portfolio management option from Atlassian. However, if I look at the whole ROI, it is reasonable. That said, of course, we would love it if the price was reduced.

I'd rate the solution four out of five in terms of value for money.

In ServiceNow, since we are an MSP and a premium partner with ServiceNow, we pretty much cater almost to the entire suite, or at least the entire ITX. That's IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, IT Business Management, and then more or less the governance risk and compliance aspects.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We wanted to build not just in operations but a whole system, service portfolio, and strategic portfolio. We're using it to map the IT strategy and our capabilities. Our service portfolio could help us form a long-term perspective to see where our deficiencies are and continuously improve.

We only started to use it last year because I took an administrator's course to understand how it all works, and I started to iteratively build onto that. Now, we have a full strategic portfolio management of our current capabilities against our workforce, the business needs, and what we're servicing. We have metrics against that to see where we're failing or what we're good at.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

The solution is deployed on cloud.

There are 10 people using this solution. It's used occasionally, not daily. We have plans to increase usage. I set up the demand management side, and we're starting to have regular catchups and get the business to start registering the demand so we can do roadmap planning. It's going to be used a lot more in the next coming months.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very intuitive to set up. Everything has a logical sequence, and you can see how it all links together. It's a good win for ServiceNow.

We also chose this solution because we're building an environment of ServiceNow. We're looking at the financial side, so it's almost like we have a single pane of glass of how we're running the business in terms of IT. The more we use it, the more value we're getting out of it.

I have used this solution since 2018.

We haven't had any issues with stability. I've had a few blips with the configuration, but that's because I set it up wrong.

I had a few issues with the AI machine learning. I looked at the data to give me some insights and it just didn't work, but it was because of how I set it up.

I would rate the stability as nine out of ten.

The scalability is very good. There's flexibility with customizing how it all works, and it's pretty straightforward. If you need extra fields or extra workflows, you can do it.

I would rate the scalability as nine out of ten.

I would rate technical support as nine out of ten. 

Technical support is helpful. They would log in and say, "Oh, you've done X, Y, and Z, but you need to change this." They don't give generic answers. They actually  see how it's done and give me some corrective measures to fix it.

ServiceNow has very clear guidance on how to set it up correctly. It wasn't difficult, it just took some time to set up.

I would rate the setup as seven out of ten.

We used an integrator to set up the basics, just enough to get the operations working, but ultimately I set it up. It took me a year or so, but I managed to get it all working.

We have seen ROI. We're looking at the consolidation of our applications and spending. In terms of ROI, we have full visibility, and we're starting to cut costs. There's definitely ROI in terms of the data because we've never had all of the insights, and it's definitely helping drive business change and decisions.

When we originally set it up, we had some kind of success manager free of charge, and now it's an additional charge over and above what we're paying. It's an extra £8,000, but then they would help you drive the adoption better or whatever you need for the business. I only used them for the last few months and then they said that it would be chargeable at our next renewal.

I would rate the cost as five out of ten.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

My advice is to thoroughly blueprint what you're trying to achieve. It took me a long time to understand what we needed to get out of the solution. Having an integrator would have been helpful. I think you should understand your business requirements before you start implementing.

We use the solution for incident and knowledge-based management. 

We mainly use the solution to support operations and align our ITSM operations with our business goals. This involves coordinating between our application development, support teams, and network engineering teams. When there's an issue at the product or network level, we raise a ticket, and our team works together to resolve it.

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. 

I have been working with the product for eight to nine months. 

The tool is 100 percent stable. 

Regarding agents, we have roughly 50-60 who can resolve tickets in ITSM. However, around 2000-2500 people can report tickets and view tickets company-wide. 

I don't directly interact with ServiceNow support because our internal team is responsible for that. They handle any requests for configuration or development on ServiceNow. If there are any issues, they will reach out to ServiceNow support. So, I can't say for sure, but I presume they're receiving good support based on how things are handled internally.

Positive

We were using on-premise CRM solutions to handle our support cases. However, we've decided to retire CRM altogether. So, we needed to find an alternative solution. I started looking into options and consulting resources like PeerSpot and Gartner to help us decide.

The tool's deployment is difficult. I rate it a four out of ten. Integrating and setting up the basic system took a long time, about eight months. We started in December 2022 and finished in July. There were many complex scenarios and options, making it difficult. Understanding and configuring everything properly was a challenge, especially compared to setting up a similar system with Zendesk, which only took a month.

My team and I were involved in our design team. Four developers, one analyst, and two QA guys were on the ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management implementation side. So, in total, there were six people on our IT team. It took them about eight months to configure everything for us.

We moved from using an old tool to ServiceNow. The collaboration feature is a bit slow for us. We think it might be because of how we use it, not ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. We want to make it better by connecting it with Microsoft Teams.

We've been trying to integrate the solution with Teams, but it's been challenging. We're also looking to integrate it with SharePoint and Power BI. We've requested these integrations and are waiting for developers to implement them. I expect it should be straightforward based on the documentation I've seen, but I'll know once they're done. It's on hold right now, and we're waiting for them to pick up the tickets. Once they start working on it, it may take a week or two to complete. If it takes longer, it might indicate a more complex integration process.

I recommend starting with a proof of concept for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. There are simpler options out there. People tend to prefer products that are easy to use and configure. So, I'd suggest trying out the POC before deciding.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

I'm a project manager, and I'm handling ServiceNow for different clients from overseas. There are many clients which are UK-based and configuring ServiceNow for their business needs.

I can have many details in one place. It offers good centralization.

There are different modules that are quite helpful. 

You don't need a lot of plugins.

It's pretty user-friendly and easy to figure out. 

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. 

I've been using the solution for one to two years. 

I've never contacted technical support. However, I've had team members who have reached out. 

I do not have pricing information. I have used the demo version in the past.

We have a partnership with ServiceNow. 

I'm using a lot of ServiceNow methodologies in my project management tasks. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It provides everything we need in one place. 

I would recommend the solution to others. When I was first using the solution, I was impressed by how centralized the solution was. We didn't need so many plugins. I found it very easy to use.

The main thing for new users is to look at the availability of the tools to see if the solution can do what they need it to do.

We are a services company, and we have implemented ServiceNow ITBM to track our 6,500 or so resources for productivity, project management for our existing customers, and streamlining the demand activities and lead-to-cash activities. It is being used for lead management to demand management, demand management to project management, project management to resource management, and resource management to endpoint management.

Everything is valuable. It is tough to choose a particular feature, but project portfolio management along with agile 2.0 are two key product features that I would suggest for services companies like us.

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.

I have been using this solution for about six months.

It is stable. We are using ServiceNow, and we are also providing more services to our customers in the ServiceNow spectrum. We don't see any issues. Being a cloud solution, availability is not a problem.

It is scalable. There are no issues. We currently have 6,500 users. It is being used by different departments. Delivery teams are using it, which include the developers, testers, project managers, program managers, project leads, delivery managers, and resource managers managing the resources and competencies. The management team, finance team, and part of accounting teams are also utilizing the system. 

It is used on a weekly or daily basis. The project accounting team might be using the system on a monthly or biweekly basis depending on the billing frequency of a customer. Developers use it day in and day out for logging their time cards for the tasks allocated to them for a particular project. Project managers use it on a daily or weekly basis to approve timesheets. Similarly, delivery managers use it monthly or biweekly. For competency managers, it could be a daily activity to assess the capacity, do the capacity planning and allocations, and plan new recruitments.

I've used Jira about five or six years ago, but Jira didn't have similar capabilities. In ServiceNow, you can create a demand, and you can also start at the innovation or idea level. You can collect ideas from different stakeholders and systems and convert those ideas to demands. Based on the different budgets allocated to different portfolios, you can get those demands approved and convert them to projects. After that, you can manage those projects by using the agile, waterfall, or a hybrid methodology. You can also use the SAFe methodology to run your product.

Another differentiator is resource planning. You can also plan for your resources at the demand level. You can send resource planning requisitions to your competency managers so that they can be ready with resources for a feature or an upcoming project, or you can create resource plans for direct projects to get soft blocking and hard blocking. It has reports, dashboards, etc. You can easily integrate it with other systems.

It's not complex, but it's all about adaptability. The organization-level change management takes a little bit of time when we try to integrate ServiceNow ITBM with other systems, such as SuccessFactors. We are using SuccessFactors internally to take care of our core HR functionality. I would rate its setup a four out of five in terms of ease.

We are premium partners for ServiceNow.

We get an ROI with this solution.

We have a team of about 6,500 employees across the globe. So, the amount of money I'm going to save by putting the money on the table for the implementation and licenses is very high.

It provides value for money. Without the tool, it is tough to track more than 6,500 resources. In the future, when the team size grows exponentially, it would become literally impossible for any of the competencies, practices, or delivery teams to manage their resources' productivity. It would be hard to know:

• How much I'm getting out of a resource?
• How much money I'm spending on a resource?
• How much revenue I'm getting from a particular resource, division, team, or competency?

All these are possible to know by using ServiceNow. It helps us in utilizing the resources to the perfect level to generate more revenue at the same cost.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution has opened many doors for me. 

Technical support is good. 

It's a very complete solution. Aside from some complex analytics, the rest of the product is very simple and easy to use. 

There is some good documentation that you can go over. 

The price is too high. It's okay for a big company, however, for a medium-sized organization, it may be too much. They should lower the price so smaller companies can also leverage it. 

The performance analytics are too difficult and complex for me to figure out very well. 

I'd like to read more about the new features before commenting on them. 

I've been using the solution for five years. 

Technical support is very good. However, I always put someone on with better English when I will need to communicate with them.

The solution is very expensive and best for larger organizations, mostly due to the fact that it would be too costly to use for medium-sized companies. 

I'm an implementer of ServiceNow.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.