Demand Management

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Manage platform demand

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 and new ServiceNow

capabilities. That’s one of the main things you’ll learn in this Success Playbook.

Managing demand helps your ServiceNow platform team and service delivery teams you’re

your business partners’ demand and respond to their requirements. This way, the services these

teams provide are fit for their purpose. You can lose the link between business value and service

delivery without demand management 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 manage your demand for ServiceNow

functionality to learn about their business objectives and anticipate demand changes.

What you need to get started

• Identify your executive sponsor, key IT and business partners, and other SMEs to help create

your platform demand strategy and demand management process

• A system of record to track and document demand activities and stakeholders

When you should start this activity

Your demand management strategy should begin when you decide to use ServiceNow. Then

establish roles for governance, especially for the executive steering board, which sets the

direction and strategy for IT services. While you’re capturing requirements for your initial

implementation, start thinking about how you’ll gather ongoing requests for the ServiceNow

capabilities that support your changing business needs. If you already have a demand

management strategy in place, you may need to update it based on your goals for ServiceNow

and digital transformation.

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 ensure 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” to 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.

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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. At the same

time, you improve the quality of your services and capabilities through effective governance.

Playbook overview

ServiceNow recommends the four steps listed in the table to capture, prioritize, and manage

demand for Now Platform functionality.

Step

Outcome

Start

In the beginning, you’ll

build your initial or

foundational capability.

This includes setting up

initial frameworks,

defining roles, and

clarifying your objectives.

Step 1 – Create visibility by

building a demand intake

model

You’ve developed a

demand intake system to

consolidate all platform

demand requests.

Step 2 – Take control by

enhancing, prioritizing, and

approving demands

You’ve created a fact-

based decision process to

assess demands.

Improve

As you improve, you’ll

take steps that help you

reach your objectives

and see value fast.

Step 3 – Align approved

demands to business

outcomes

You’ve scheduled quarterly

meetings with your business

partners to share new

capabilities and how they

can support their digital

transformation.

Optimize

Last, you’ll refine and

expand your

capabilities, so you can

scale as you grow and

continuously get more

from using ServiceNow.

Step 4 – Increase velocity and

plan future demand

For services-focused

organizations, you’ve

assigned responsibility for

demand to service owners.

If you haven’t explicitly defined a demand management strategy with your executive sponsor

and stakeholders—one that incorporates your vision for digital transformation—we recommend

starting with Step 1.

If you currently have a demand management strategy in place, you may want to start with

steps 3 and 4 to improve how you’re managing requests for new ServiceNow capabilities.

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Step 1 – Create visibility by building a demand intake model.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Keep your demand board focused.

• Define the 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.

Get visibility into all the requests coming in for new or enhanced ServiceNow capabilities—and

get it as quickly as possible. Suppose you don’t establish a demand intake model. In that case,

the requests you receive will be disorganized, and you’ll find it very difficult to align your requests

for services to your critical business objectives. Your intake process represents the first phase in

your ServiceNow roadmap.

To create a demand intake model, complete these two action steps:

1. Define demand management roles.

Identify and define the key demand management roles:

• Demand requesters (usually business liaisons, service owners, and service desk managers)

who submit demands

• Demand owners who enhance and approve demands

• A demand board that provides governance and strategic direction

2. Define demand management intake processes.

Create a consistent method for capturing demand requests. This gives your demand

management team a solid foundation to begin evaluating and prioritizing the platform

demands. To define the demand intake processes, identify the information required to assess

the relative business value of a requirement, the cost of its implementation and support, and

its potential technical risks. The ServiceNow SPM Demand Management module can act as

your demand management record system.

Customer insights

Our customers’ experience points to two insights you should keep in mind as you build out your

demand intake model.

INSIGHT 1:

Focus your demand board on strategic decision-making

Demand boards with unclear objectives or too many members can create bottlenecks and

diminish the board’s effectiveness. The demand board can lose focus, wasting time on low-risk,

low-cost decisions or decisions required for compliance and aren’t open for debate.

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Best practice – Keep your demand board focused.

To keep the team nimble and to support a focused decision-making process, your demand

board should include only the following roles regularly:

• Now Platform owner – This person should be a senior leader who has overall accountability of

the Now Platform. The Now Platform owner leads and oversees the platform support team,

ensures the team’s work aligns with the business strategy and the ServiceNow roadmap and

participates actively in the overarching governance of the platform.

• Now Platform architect – This role should be filled by a technical leader who assures the

platform aligns with the business strategy and governance decisions. The architect

documents the platform, analyzes the impacts of new requirements, and provides controls

to ensure that business solutions are delivered using the correct technical solutions.

• Demand owner(s) – Demand owners manage the day-to-day activities of the demand

management process, drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the process, and gather

reports on process metrics. Small organizations may only need one or two part-time demand

owners, but larger organizations usually require dedicated full-time demand owner roles.

• Business relationship managers maintain a positive relationship with customers, identifying

customer needs and ensuring that the service provider can meet these needs with an

appropriate catalog of services.

As needed, invite supplementary stakeholders to provide background, input, and feedback on

specific demands, like IT process or domain owners, portfolio or service owners, program

managers, vendor managers, key suppliers, and partners.

Best practice – Define minimum thresholds for your demand board

Make sure you define minimum thresholds that guide the demand board’s involvement in

decision-making. Your demand board may get bogged down with tactical, low-value demands

if you don't do this. There’s no reason you can’t let demand owners approve specific demands,

like:

• Demands that are required for compliance reasons

• Small demands with a properly documented business value

Use Table 1 as a decision tree to determine when demand owners or the demand board should

approve new demands.

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Allow demand owners to approve small,

tactical demands to be more responsive to

business requests, such as:

Escalate demand approval to the demand

board for more complex demands, such as:

• Demands requiring fewer than 40 hours of

effort, like those that don’t require creating a

project

• Demands that require creating a project

shorter than a specific duration, less than

four weeks, for example

• Demands that you have to meet, regardless

of size, such as those required before an

approved upgrade

• Strategic demands that tie to

transformational portfolios and themes

• Demands requiring a project more

significant than a fiscal quarter (90 days) or

those that span fiscal years

• Demands with high risks due to resource

requirements, compressed timelines,

complex technical requirements, or other

factors

• Demands with stakeholders who span

multiple business units

Table 1: Decision criteria for demands that require demand owner versus demand board approval

You’ll find more information on estimating and prioritizing demands in Step 2 of this Success

Playbook.

INSIGHT 2:

Collect the correct information from demand requesters

Requiring demand requesters to provide overly detailed business cases or value calculations is a

barrier to entry, resulting in stifled demand or shadow development. Demand owners are

responsible for enhancing the initial request, so only require enough information to allow your

demand owners to make an initial assessment.

Best practice – Keep demand request forms simple to promote adoption

Require just enough information on your demand request forms for demand owners to perform

triage. Start with basic information:

• Brief description – This should describe what the result looks like, not just the technical steps to

make it happen. In other words, avoid descriptions like “Add field X to form Y for view Z.”

Consider using a user story format for the description: “As a <type of user>, I want <some

goal> so that <some reason>.”

• Business case – These are general business arguments that support the demand. This should

include a business outcome that the demand will impact. You should describe how the

current state is holding back value realization and the strategies and goals that the demand

will support.

• Business unit and department of the submitter

• Impacted business units – These are the business units impacted by the submitted demand.

• Executive sponsor – This provides management support for the requesting organization and

helps avoid frivolous demands.

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EXPERT TIP

Organizations sometimes roll out ideation—opening the demand process to a much wider

audience—before they have a robust demand intake process in place. This can lead to

flooding inexperienced demand owners with an overwhelming number of requests. Instead,

hold off on ideation until your demand management process has matured enough to

handle the substantial increase in your request volume.

What to do next

Now that you’ve defined your demand management roles and have created a demand intake

model, you’ll have much better visibility into the requests from the business for new ServiceNow

capabilities.

Revisit these roles and responsibilities periodically, especially as you begin using ServiceNow in

new areas of your organization. For example, you might need to set up a global demand board

to cover the demand for your global applications, and spin-off scoped application demand

management to your local demand boards. Local demand boards will take their governance

cues from the global board, but they allow your organization to handle requests on a larger

scale.

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Step 2 – Take control by enhancing, prioritizing, and approving

demands.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Include business users in the demand management process.

• Create and publish definitions for the T-shirt sizing you’ll use to measure demand.

• Score your demands based on explicit business objectives rather than simply functional or

procedural improvements.

• Prioritize the enhancements that cover as many user stories as possible.

Once you’ve defined your demand management roles and created a demand intake process,

it’s time to start evaluating, prioritizing, and approving demands. You must have a firm demand

owner. They’re responsible for gathering enough information about the demand that the

demand board can make confident, fact-based decisions that best support your organization’s

business objectives.

To enhance, prioritize, and approve demands, complete these action steps:

1. Assign demand requests and enhance them with additional information.

Assign a demand owner to each demand request and track the progress of the demand

request using demand states (for example, draft, submitted, screening, deferred, approved,

and completed). See Figure 1 for a depiction of the standard demand state flow. Enhance

the demand request by:

• Assigning it to a portfolio

• Adding impacted stakeholders

• Documenting additional information such as requirements, decisions, risks, and costs

• Conducting an architectural assessment

2. Determine demand approval thresholds based on the size of the demand.

Demands will come in all shapes and sizes, so don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to

approve them. Tying up your demand board with approving small, tactical projects isn’t an

efficient use of their time. Give demand owners the latitude to make decisions on demands

up to a specific size, and they will then inform the demand board of those decisions.

3. Gather assessments from stakeholders.

For demands identified as strategic, after the demand owner has enhanced the demand

request with additional cost, risk, and value information, they should get further input from

stakeholders using assessments. Assessments allow stakeholders to score questions on a scale

of one to 10 so that results can be consolidated to provide a quantitative score for risk and

business value. The demand board uses these scores as a factor in the decision-making

process.

4. Create a demand resource plan.

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For complex demands, the demand owner should also estimate the effort using T-shirt sizes

and assess the capacity of your organization to put the demand into action. For demands

greater than small, the demand owner should construct a resource plan based on the

estimated requirements to create more accurate cost estimates and avoid over-committing

limited development resources.

5. Approve, defer, or reject the demand request.

For qualified demands, the demand owner or demand board should review the requests

and ensure that all proposals for ServiceNow functionality, configuration, or customization

adhere to the explicitly defined criteria for business value. The demand board should

carefully scrutinize the demands that require customization to pave the way for a smooth

upgrade and weigh the customization effort against the demand’s business value.

Determine the disposition of the demand using legal statuses, such as Deferred, Approved,

and Completed. Create an “artifact,” or output, of the approved demand as your final step.

Table 2 shows the artifact record created based on the Category and Type values on the

ServiceNow demand record.

Category

Type

Artifact record created

Strategic

Project

Strategic

Enhancement

SDLC Enhancement

Operational

Defect

SDLC Defect

Operational

Change

Table 2: Artifact record based on the Category and Type values

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Figure 1: Standard demand state flow

Customer insights

Customer experience points to three insights you should keep in mind to enhance and evaluate

demands.

INSIGHT 1:

Be transparent with business users on how you prioritize demands

Business users need to understand what to expect from the demand management process. Their

demands are (or should be) tied directly to their business objectives, so they’ll want to stay

apprised of the status of their requests. Suppose demand requesters don’t understand the

process, including assessing, enhancing, and prioritizing demands. In that case, they’re likely to

mistrust the process and might look for “shadow channels” to achieve their goals.

Correctly estimating the size of a demand is a critical factor in prioritization. Using T-shirt sizes is a

convenient and familiar model for demand sizing. Still, vague size values can lead to inconsistent

interpretation—this can be confusing and frustrating for demand owners and demand

requesters.

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Best practice – Include business users in demand management

Provide them with status updates (or even their view of their demands), meet with them, explain

the demand management process, and include them in crucial information-gathering and

decision-making activities. Provide business users with a simple flow—like the flow in Figure 1—

that maps out the demand management stages and the activities that drive those stages.

Best practice – Create and publish definitions for the T-shirt sizes used to measure demand.

Make sure you include a unit of measure, which may be based on efforts, like FTE work-weeks,

cost, or even Agile story points. This process ensures that your demand requesters interpret the

values correctly and consistently.

Table 3 shows example definitions based on estimated work or estimated cost.

Size

Estimated work

(FTE weeks)

Estimated cost

< 2 weeks

< $10k

2 to 4 weeks

$10k to $50k

4 to 8 weeks

$50k to $150k

8 to 16 weeks

$150k to $500k

XXL

> 16 weeks

> $500k

Table 3: T-shirt sizes

INSIGHT 2:

Score demands based on explicit business objectives

Process improvements and screen layouts are essential considerations for user experience

because they increase adoption and streamline business processes. But it’s crucial to link

business demands to the business value they create, and the stronger the tie is to a business

objective, the higher its value score should be.

You should base demand decisions on a combination of value, risk, and size. The ServiceNow

demand workbench includes an interactive bubble chart for assessing demands based on

value, risk, and size, allowing your demand owners and demand board to visualize and prioritize

demands easily. Figure 2 shows an example demand workbench.

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Figure 2: A demand workbench

Best practice – Use a simple scale to score demand value

Score demand value on a simple scale based on business objectives, adoption requirements,

and experience improvements. If you’re just getting started with demand management, a

straightforward method to incorporate this mindset is to define value scoring that prioritizes

demands that most connect to business objectives, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Value scoring

Share your value scoring framework with demand requesters and stakeholders to score the

values consistently throughout the assessment process.

If you’re using ServiceNow Demand Management, value scores are calculated and normalized

on a scale of 1–10 using two fields on the demand records. They’re weighted, as shown in Table

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Impact (60%*)

1 – High = 10

2 – Medium = 5

3 – Low = 1

Financial return (40%*)

Total planned cost – Financial benefit

> $1M = 10

$750k – 1M = 9

$500k – 750k = 8

$250k – 500k = 6

$100k – 250k = 4

$50k – 100k = 2

< $50k = 1

* Fields, weights, and normalized scores are out-of-the-box defaults in the

London release, and you can tailor them according to your organization’s

requirements.

Table 4: ServiceNow Demand Management value score calculation

Similarly, size and risk scores are also normalized on a scale of 1–10 to simplify comparing

demands. Size scores are normalized based on the T-Shirt Size field:

• XXL – Extra extra large = 10

• XL – Extra large = 8

• L – Large = 6

• M – Medium = 4

• S – Small = 2

Risk scores are calculated using the demand assessment responses from stakeholders, also

based on a scale of 1 (very low risk) to 10 (very high risk). The demand owner asks stakeholders

to rate these risk areas:

• Time delay – Is the project susceptible to time delays? These can be caused by changes in

technology, requirements of participating organizations, seasonal considerations, the need

for policy approvals, or external influences. (Rate from 1–10.)

• Business case – Does this fulfill compliance and regulatory requirements?

• 1 = The business case is compelling, value is extensively documented, or a business case

is not required.

• 5 = The business case provides a good demonstration of value; some details require

further clarification.

• 10 = The business case does not demonstrate value or is not complete.

• Business expansion – Does this require additional infrastructure or business expansion? (Rate

from 1–10.)

• Commitment – Does this contain significant dependencies? (Rate from 1–10.)

Stakeholders should also consider whether:

• A senior project sponsor or management champion is engaged

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• Stakeholders and partners are willing to reallocate resources if necessary

• Senior executive management oversight is in place

• Commitment from all stakeholders is confirmed

Another note about assessments: Don’t over-burden your stakeholders with elaborate

assessments for more minor, tactical demands. For example, don’t require assessments that

have a small T-shirt size. If you do, your stakeholders may suffer from “assessment fatigue.”

INSIGHT 3:

Look for economies of scale in your demands

As demands start rolling in, demand owners sometimes focus too closely on each discrete

demand and on assessing them individually. By doing so, they can overlook opportunities to

combine demands into programs that address multiple user stories for a given business

capability or business function. These missed opportunities can lead to overestimating resources

in the resource plan and extra work in putting it together.

Best practice – Prioritize enhancements based on user stories

Prioritize the enhancements that take care of as many user stories as possible. As you review

demands based on their value, risk, and size scores, if these are equal, give an edge to those

demands and address a more significant number of user stories.

What to do next

By completing this step, you can now make fact-based decisions about how you’ll deploy your

development resources and align them to your business-related value drivers.

Now that you have visibility and control of your demands, it’s time to move into proactive mode

by working with your business partners to get ahead of demand requests. You’ll build trust and

credibility by learning about their business objectives—and when they change—and by using

your knowledge of upcoming ServiceNow releases to propose demands that will anticipate their

needs.

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Step 3 – Align approved demands to business outcomes.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Develop background depth 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.

You’re now managing incoming demands effectively. You’ve established a regular cadence of

demand reviews and are smoothly transitioning demands into projects, enhancements, defects,

and changes. But here’s the thing: you’re still reacting to incoming demands. Raise your value to

the business by getting ahead of the demand curve: Meet with your business partners regularly

to understand their changing business objectives.

EXPERT TIP

As you prepare for meetings with your business partners, work with your ServiceNow team to

learn about new capabilities in upcoming releases. Incorporate this knowledge into your

conversations with the business to guide their demand requests and avoid unnecessary

platform customization.

To align your approved demands to business outcomes, create a continuous feedback loop

from strategic drivers to your ServiceNow roadmap, as shown in figure 4:

Figure 4: Align demands to business outcomes

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1. Use business unit strategic plans and key performance indicators (KPIs) to anticipate

demand changes.

Business services support business outcomes, focusing on the right outcome metrics for the

right cost. You can get ahead of new demands for services and ServiceNow functionality by

understanding business unit strategic plans and key KPIs. Map these to capabilities and your

current services and ServiceNow roadmap for effective demand conversations.

2. Focus demand conversations on business needs.

Make demand management proactive, not reactive. Service organizations—and the

ServiceNow platform team—should reach out to service consumers (business partners) to

learn about their key business outcomes and propose solutions that encourage them to use

ServiceNow.

Focus your conversation with business partners on:

• Making progress toward business outcomes, so you know where changes need to be

made to the ServiceNow roadmap to ensure value realization

• How employees are consuming services through ServiceNow

Demand owners should take their cues from the executive steering board’s strategic

governance activities, especially regarding the ServiceNow roadmap and plans for activity

sequencing for ServiceNow use, features, and functionality. This gives you better

opportunities for demand conversations and helps business stakeholders understand the

value that customization or change will bring to a platform or process.

Customer insights

Our customers’ experience points to two key insights you should keep in mind to align demands

to business outcomes.

INSIGHT 1:

Start conversations with business unit strategic objectives

When you meet with business partners, don’t jump right into discussing their ServiceNow

workflows before you take time to understand their current and future strategic objectives. If

you’re just learning about the process flows, you may not be able to create a “through-line”

from a proposed demand to their objectives later on. Learning about their business objectives

will give you additional insight into which new ServiceNow capabilities will provide the best

business value.

Best practice – Develop background depth in your stakeholders’ business outcomes.

Learning the background behind your stakeholders’ business outcomes will help you anticipate

their demands for digital transformation. Before you meet with stakeholders, your ServiceNow

demand owner should review the annual reports or internally circulate strategic outcomes for

the business units you’re meeting with. Most of these outcomes fall into one of the following

categories or strategic drivers:

• Cost reduction or reallocation, like shifting spending from “run” to “grow.”

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• Increase revenue

• Improve employee/customer experience

• Risk reduction

• Accelerated innovation

Sample business outcomes include:

• Reduce the meantime to prioritize and resolve incidents and vulnerabilities

• Reduce the backlog of security incidents and vulnerabilities

• Ensure protection of critical services

Link your new business KPIs and metrics that contribute to outcomes to current ServiceNow

functionality to assess any gaps. These gaps can represent opportunities to propose

enhancements or capabilities for demands that you anticipate in the near term.

For example, increasing the customer share of the wallet may involve improving the customer

data available to call center agents for cross-sale and making that data usable. That may

require more integration between ServiceNow and other critical systems.

When you make enhancements, communicate them to your strategic and portfolio

governance functions—and ask them to review them—before you share them with your

stakeholders. This way, you can avoid making commitments that your ServiceNow roadmap

doesn’t support.

INSIGHT 2:

Share your ServiceNow roadmap with your business partners

Your business partners are asking you to help them be successful. You can undoubtedly show

value by being responsive to their demand requests, but you run the risk of staying a step behind

them. You’re also missing out on the perfect opportunity to incorporate what you know about

upcoming ServiceNow capabilities and upgrades in your conversation—you may be able to

address many demands simply by educating your partners on the capabilities they have today

and will have with planned upgrades and extensions.

Best practice – Conduct briefing tours

Conduct a briefing tour at least once or twice per year to educate business partners on

ServiceNow capabilities. In each briefing, give them information on your ServiceNow

applications—like IT Service Management, IT Business Management, or HR Service Delivery—as

well as on the Now Platform capabilities. Time these briefings before you upgrade so your

business partners are familiar with the new capabilities to address emergent demands.

A great way to accomplish this is by scheduling a session in our Executive Briefing Center (EBC).

ServiceNow built the EBC to engage in complex conversations with customers about their

experiences and aspirations for automating business services. With an agenda customized

around your goals, working with the EBC gives you in‑depth exchanges with our business and

technology experts to:

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• Consolidate information gathering

• Provide valuable perspective on your strategy and initiatives

• Shape your ServiceNow roadmap

What to do next

By scheduling reviews with your business partners and anticipating their demand requests, you’ll

be able to deliver greater value and be more responsive to their demands. They’ll see that

you’re focused on their strategic objectives, and you’ll build greater trust—so you can become

true partners in managing and shaping demand.

Make sure that you’re documenting your successes. Success stories are great resources when

you’re ready to identify use cases to extend ServiceNow across the enterprise. Ask your

successful business partners to serve as internal references for your efforts.

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Step 4 – Increase velocity and plan future demand.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Before adopting Agile practices, define metrics to measure how increased velocity will

impact your business objectives and demand management process.

Once you have visibility into your demands, you control the demand review and assessment

process and their alignment to business objectives—and your demand board can increase your

demand management velocity by borrowing from the Agile playbook.

Velocity does more than just allow your organization to arrive at demand decisions more quickly.

When demand owners use Agile techniques, they can test for changes in the business climate

more often and tie demand to capacity in near-real-time.

To improve the velocity of demand management, complete these action steps:

1. Apply Agile practices to increase demand responsiveness.

To increase velocity, schedule daily demand board intake standups, review new demand

requests, and provide updates on-demand enhancements.

2. As the organization becomes more services-focused, shift responsibility for demand

management to the service owner.

As the enterprise service management or transformation journey matures, decisions on

service investment within a services-focused organization should be given to service owners

because they’re best placed to identify how and where to meet customer needs. Service

owners have complete control over run-the-business (RTB) costs. At the same time, change-

the-business (CTB) investments are decided across all services, based on the organization’s

strategy and defined value outcomes.

Customer insight

Keep this insight from our customers in mind as you apply Agile techniques to demand

management.

INSIGHT:

Remember the total business impact as you incorporate Agile practices into demand

management

Many organizations already using Agile practices tend to focus solely on increasing velocity

without considering the total potential business impact of adopting Agile techniques into the

demand management process.

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Agile techniques often emphasize effectiveness over efficiency, so some techniques—like daily

standups—might require more resources, on average, to make a decision. But the iterative

nature of standups should, in theory, reduce the number of errors over time.

Best practice – Define metrics before adopting Agile

Before adopting Agile practices, define metrics to measure how an increased velocity will

impact your business objectives and demand management process. Your metrics should

measure your success in customer outcomes and the effectiveness, quality, and efficiency of

your demand management process.

Table 5 shows examples of metrics that reflect both customer outcomes and demand

management.

Customer outcomes

Demand management

% reduction in RTB costs

Time from Submitted to Qualified request

Net Promoter Scores (or similar) for the service from

business stakeholders

% of rejected requests

% or deferred requests

Backlog (volume/length) for ServiceNow

functionality, configuration, or customization

Table 5: Metrics used to assess the impact of improved velocity on business outcomes and

demand management

What to do next

Using Agile techniques should be just that—using techniques like daily standups can help you

improve your velocity and effectiveness. You don’t need a complete overhaul of your demand

management process. Evaluate and select strategies that can deliver improvements without

substantial cost or organizational change management.

Revisit your demand management processes and revise them as needed, using either Agile

techniques or standard process improvement tactics. Identify the bottlenecks that slow down

your demand management process—training opportunities—as you onboard new demand

requesters and stakeholders.

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companies with which they are associated.

The takeaway

A structured process to gather, evaluate, and approve demand requests helps you capture

ServiceNow’s full value while managing risks and limited resources. Good demand

management is not a matter of triage or saying “no.” Still, a means to ensure that your resources

are aligned to the organization’s most important priorities and risk profile. The most successful

demand management teams will foster a strategic relationship with their internal ServiceNow

users to anticipate and address their needs most effectively.

What does “good, better, best” look like for this activity?

Good – You’ve created a consolidated demand intake process and only prioritize demands

captured through that process.

Better – You’ve established a fact-based demand prioritization and approval process that

accurately estimates resource requirements and aligns demands to business outcomes.

Best – You’ve anticipated business demand by scheduling ongoing meetings with your business

partners and reflected their business outcomes in your demand backlog.

What should I convey to my team?

Demand management isn’t about saying “no.” A good demand management process builds a

strong relationship with business partners and brings them the capabilities most needed to

advance their business needs.

For access to actionable insights on this topic, review our Customer Success Center resources.

If you have any questions on this topic or would like to contribute to future ServiceNow best

practice content, please contact us at [email protected].

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companies with which they are associated.

Appendix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

To determine if you performed the actions in this Success Playbook effectively, measure the

following top KPIs:

• Total number of Approved demands – This metric helps determine the future workload of

project delivery.

• Percentage of demands that move to Approved – This metric determines the percentage of

demands that move to the Qualified state. A high percentage of Qualified demands may

indicate future investment requirements.

• Percentage of demands that move to More Information – This metric indicates that the

quality of documented ideas may be low, indicating possible training needs.

• Backlog (volume/length) for ServiceNow functionality, configuration, or customization – This

metric provides insight into the efficiency of your demand management process.

• Voice of the Customer and Net Promoter Scores for services – This metric can provide an

indirect indicator of whether the services offered through ServiceNow meet demands for

functionality and experience.

Stakeholder management

Use this chart to identify which stakeholders need to be held responsible/accountable and who

need to keep consulted/informed.

Responsible/accountable stakeholders:

• Chief information officer/senior IT leadership

• Service owner/team

• Enterprise architecture

• Now Platform owner

Key messaging:

• Report on the status of demands approvals.

• Report on the status of demand assessments.

• Request completion of demand assessments.

Consulted/informed stakeholders:

• Business engagement teams

• Business partners (internal and external)

• All IT staff (mainly help desk)

• Vendors

Key messaging:

• Announce the disposition of submitted demands.

• Request completion of demand assessments.

Related resources

• Success Checklist – Manage platform demand

• ServiceNow Demand Management

• ServiceNow Product Documentation on Demand Management