Opportunity:
Entering into an existing ServiceNow platform, Contender was tasked with returning the existing Project Portfolio Management (PPM) suite of applications, which included Ideation, Demand, Project and Portfolio Management to the ServiceNow Out-of-Box state. The school had implemented the PPM application more than four years prior and customized the suite of applications to meet their business needs, which over time, had paralleled the latest ServiceNow release. Contender assessed and performed the rollback, to take the client back to the Out-of-Box state in order to make subsequent upgrades of the platform much simpler and allowed them to take full advantage of future ServiceNow upgrades to the PPM suite.
Our Approach and Recommendations:
Customization Rollback
As there is no z-boot function for individual applications on the ServiceNow platform, the approach taken was to remove the customizations that the client had implemented. The first step was to archive a copy of the legacy customized application in a Sandbox environment. The Contender development team then reviewed upgrade skips for PPM applications and reverted them back to the Out-of-Box state. They also reviewed custom artifacts and disabled them., in addition to reviewed PPM tables for added fields and deleting them. The plugin of the most current release for PPM with Financials was loaded onto the platform and the relevant project data was reloaded from Production. Having a Sandbox environment was essential for testing and validating the functionality.
Project and Portfolio Management
Once the most current release of the PPM application suite was loaded in, the client was able to take advantage of Out-of-Box features they had previously skipped over, such as creating project templates for ease of use and time saving for project managers that used similar work breakdown structures year over year for new projects; and widgets on the project Portal view, which allowed timely information and visibility on project status and open project defects.
Resources and Timecards
With the PPM suite returned to an out-of-box state, the customer implemented Resource Management and Timecards which gave the client the ability to manage resource availability and allocation, as well as account for labor time as actual costs.
The Results
Within four months, the client was able to return to utilizing project and portfolio management within ServiceNow, but with the confidence that the suite of applications and all included functions would not risk breaking upon platform upgrades. The client can continue to track enhancements and projects from ideation through delivery with full transparency.
