Twice a year, ServiceNow release major new versions of their platform. As ServiceNow Premier Partners, we regularly get insight to what’s coming in new releases. Here are eight cool things we’ve seen coming in the New York release. Note safe harbor applies – these features may not be exactly like this in the GA release.
- Mobile App For Project Status:
My favourite enhancement, and something many of our customers have been waiting for. ServiceNow’s mobile app now helps you to track and manage projects, collaborate with related stakeholders, and take timely actions on the go. And it looks great!
2. Investment funding:
My second favourite feature is Investment Funding. Now you can plan and manage investments by allocating funds to funding entities and prioritize your investments based on business needs. You can create investments for funding entities, allocate funds to an investment, or request funds from one or more funding sources.
3. Resource Management:
Resource Managers life is now simpler – you can use a single page, without having to open the form, to view, modify, request, allocate, complete & cancel resources. Project Managers can also recalculate costs when hourly rates change in the associated rate model to keep the costs up to date.
4. Demand Tasks:
Create & delegate demand tasks like coordinating with stakeholders, effort, risk, and benefit planning. You can also more easily track cost & effort spent by resources on demand tasks.
5. Projection Execution Type:
You can now execute a project against Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid templates.
This will save a lot of time for customers who use Agile and Project Management applications. Now you can directly switch to Agile 2.0 from Project form, through a related link. It also automatically creates a backlog for respective project. You won’t have to create a backlog or map stories manually.
6. Report Filtering:
Finally, you can now filter reports on these dashboards by more than one element breakdown! I’m happy about this improvement – the improved flexibility will help you to get better insight towards your data.
7. Timesheet Monthly Reporting:
A real timesaver this one. Monthly management and invoicing for resources is now much simpler – you’ll be able to generate a timecard report by days for any period, irrespective of the time sheet week that the timecards belong to. Say August starts on a Wednesday and ends on a Friday, you will be able to run a timecard report from August 1 (Wednesday) to August 31 (Friday) and not need any time outside of that date range. Whew!
8. Innovation Management:
A small but nifty improvement here. Collaboration between submitters, project managers and stakeholders will be simplified. Ideas can be voted on, and Ideas can now be directly converted to Demand, Project, epics or stories. This will help you manage requests or stories without having to go through the entire PPM cycle.
