APM | The Big Picture

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/tokyo-it-business-management/page/product/application-portfolio-management/concept/application-portfolio-management.html

The purpose of this post is to offer advice and potentially some alternatives when building out indicators based on Assessments within APM.

If unfamiliar with assessments, here is a link to the ServiceNow documentation. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-servicenow-platform/page/administer/assessments/reference/r_Assessments.html

Scoring profiles are made up of one or many indicators (not to be confused with Performance Analytic indicators) and associated with several business applications or capabilities. When assessments are generated for a year/quarter these are typically assigned to a user identified on the business application record such as the “IT Application owner” or “Application portfolio manager”.

The challenge with these assessments is that the collected scores will not populate unless 100% of the application indicators are complete.  For organizations with hundreds and sometimes thousands of applications, one incomplete assessment for one application can impact the application scoring for the entire organization. Meaning the business application scores will not be available to review for that year/quarter until the outstanding assessment is complete and submitted.

There must be a better way!

The first question to ask is, are application assessments absolutely required?

Some alternative options include:

• Advanced Rationalization
  • Move towards a more advanced scoring profile that does not depend on assessments.
• Form Values
  • Move assessment-based questions to fields on the business application record and then ensure these are part of the data certification process prior to the scoring cycle. Better yet can these values be derived from existing fields?
    • Careful consideration should be made before adding custom fields to a table in ServiceNow.

If assessments are required, there are also some alternative options.

• Limit the target
  • Shrink the assessors required to someone like the “Application portfolio manager” who can complete assessments for all applications in a portfolio. This does not scale well for organizations with a large number of business applications.
• Influence
  • Try to influence assessors to complete tasks on time (carrot or stick).
• Scripted Solution
  • This is accomplished by changing the indicator type from assessments to a custom script. With a custom script we can pull in the submitted value before all assessments are complete.
  • The question that comes up next is what to do for those unsubmitted assessment scores. Some options include using the last period’s submitted result, last period’s submitted result + a penalty, assume the worst case (worst possible score), or assume the best case (best possible score).
  • For implementation the result is stored in asmt_category_result table, using the source_id as the business application sys_id and the rating field as the submitted value. This rating value can then be included in the payload along with the business application sys_id.

APM can be used for business applications or business capabilities. For simplicity, I assumed business application in the scenario above however, the scenario will hold true for business capabilities as well.

The post Application Portfolio Management (APM) assessment challenges appeared first on ServiceNow Guru.

There’s no doubt that ServiceNow has been (and continues to be) the proverbial “rising tide that lifts all boats” and I’ll forever consider it a blessing to have been introduced to this technology during its early days. There are so many people that helped me (both ServiceNow employees and clients) during those years as an administrator and consultant at ServiceNow. The contents of this site are really a giant collection of your great ideas over the years! Thank you to Michael Brown for giving me my first full-time job in the IT world, Matt Holetz for hiring me as a wide-eyed recent college graduate with a grand total of 8 weeks of ServiceNow experience and trusting me to handle full enterprise implementations on my own, and countless clients and consultants along the way. ServiceNow Guru ended up being the perfect launching pad for Crossfuze a few years later and has continued to help us be successful as a ServiceNow implementation partner. James Farrer (who is an absolute ServiceNow wizard) and Darwin Nielsen (who ran the whole business for over 3 years) were crazy enough to join us before we were even a viable company and have both been instrumental in helping Crossfuze to evolve into the leading consulting organization it is today.

There’s nobody I need to thank more than Jacob Andersen, who followed me to ServiceNow and co-founded Crossfuze with me just over 5 years ago. It’s not much of a secret to anybody who knows both of us, but he’s way more talented technically with ServiceNow than I am and I’m fortunate to have been able to lean on him for so long. Although there’s no doubt both of us wanted to be successful, more than anything we were completely addicted to the ServiceNow technology and loved making our clients happy. It’s a pretty simple formula, but it worked pretty well for us.

Looking back on this journey over the past several months and looking forward to some other priorities and goals in my life has led me to the realization that it’s time for me to step away from the ServiceNow world for a while. I’m anxious to spend more time with my wife and 5 kids at home and consider future opportunities.

Knowledge17 will mark my last week with Crossfuze and will also be a fresh start for ServiceNow Guru with a transfer of ownership and management to Crossfuze. With Chris Howard and the Crossfuze ServiceNow team at the helm, I can’t think of a better place to leave it. Alhough I’ll be stepping away, I’m confident that it will be in good hands and will continue to be a valuable source of quality ServiceNow technical content for years to come.

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