What's in this Success Playbook

One of the benefits of a successful ServiceNow^® implementation is that you can use the Now Platform^® to support business use cases for digital transformation across your organization. But to do this successfully, you need to manage demand for enhancements as well as new ServiceNow capabilities. 

Managing demand helps your ServiceNow platform team and service delivery teams evaluate your business partners’ demand and respond to their requirements. This way, the services these teams provide are fit for purpose. Without demand management, you can lose the link between business value and service delivery and derail your transformation journey.

Demand will change as your business conditions and objectives change. To address these changes, work with your business stakeholders to learn about their business objectives and anticipate demand changes.

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

Good demand management isn’t a matter of triage or saying “no”—it’s a way to make sure that your resources are aligned to your organization’s most important priorities and risk profile. The most successful demand management teams will foster a strategic relationship with their internal ServiceNow “customers” so they can anticipate and address their needs most effectively. So make this a clear, simple, and iterative process that helps your customers draw a clear line between their business objectives and Now Platform capabilities.

The payoff of getting this right

When your demand management function responds to your changing business objectives, you’ll gain improved visibility, control, and alignment of your ServiceNow roadmap while you improve the quality of your services and capabilities through effective governance.

Steps covered

Step 1: Create visibility by building a demand intake model

• Keep your demand board focused.
• Define minimum thresholds to guide the demand board’s involvement in decision-making.
• Keep demand request forms simple to promote adoption. Only include enough information for demand owners to perform triage.

Step 2: Take control by enhancing, prioritizing, and approving demands

• Include business users in the demand management process.
• Create and publish definitions for the criteria you’ll use to measure demand.
• Score your demands based on explicit business objectives rather than simply functional or procedural improvements.
• Prioritize enhancements that cover as many user stories as possible.

Step 3: Align approved demands to business outcomes     

• Develop background in your stakeholders’ business outcomes to anticipate demands for digital transformation.
• Conduct a briefing tour at least once or twice per year to educate your business partners on ServiceNow capabilities.

Step 4: Increase velocity and plan future demand      

• Before you adopt Agile practices, define metrics to measure how increased velocity will impact your business objectives and demand management process.