Managers juggle team demands, priorities, and budgets while keeping an eye on long-term business objectives. Accomplishing all this requires solutions that assist organizations in managing their digital workflows. Enter ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM), a cloud-based computing platform that utilizes up-to-date, tailored digital tools to address these challenges.
However, not all tools are equal. ServiceNow offers two separate but related bundles that help meet different objectives. Management teams should analyze their needs and compare the ServiceNow ITBM standard vs. professional package features before making a purchasing decision.
Who Uses the ServiceNow ITBM Standard vs. Professional Packages?
The ServiceNow ITBM standard package is ideal for companies of all sizes. It includes the application management tools necessary to evaluate company performance, monitor resources, and accurately complete projects on time.
More complex enterprises may benefit from a professional package, which includes added features to assist in scaling frameworks, promotes agility, and ensures accurate product and service testing. These organizations might include research institutions, government entities, financial service providers, healthcare providers, and educational institutions.
ServiceNow ITBM Standard vs. Professional Package
The differences between the ServiceNow ITBM standard and professional packages lie mainly within the scope of services, which are as follows:
Standard Package
The standard package includes the following four tools:
Performance Analytics
ServiceNow Performance Analytics (PA) provides historical data and situational context to evaluate overall company health. It analyzes and updates key performance indicators (KPIs) like the number of tickets resolved per call, average resolution time, monthly trends, and average ticket lifespan to make accurate decisions.
This data is then consolidated onto a single dashboard, saving your workforce time.
Demand Management
Demand Management is a tool for evaluating and promoting ideas surrounding strategic and operational demands. It includes instruments for capturing and assessing those strategies while providing a central spot to manage the resulting data by:
- Classifying needs into strategic and operational categories
- Providing a proper governance model for identifying demand while creating and assigning related tasks
- Providing stakeholders with complete visibility of costs and necessary resources
Resource Management
Resource Management allows team leaders to view the structure of company resources and assign those resources to projects in the pipeline.
Poor communication frequently results in wasted work hours. With the following application tools, Resource Management bridges these communication gaps and streamlines the staffing process:
- Resource Workbench. Two application tools come standard with the Resource Workbench: Allocation Workbench and Capacity Planning. The Allocation Workbench is a user interface that displays resource plans and the estimated time to finish tasks. Capacity Planning gives managers a complete picture of resource capacity, allocations, and utilization.
- Resource Schedule. A resource schedule and calendar provides managers with a glance of available resources at any given time across the organization.
- Resource Workflows. Resource Management also comes complete with standard workflows. Users can design resource plans and deliver them to managers for approval, relaying notifications to the appropriate team members.
- Resource Management Reports. Lastly, the program provides managers with standard reports on availability, use, and resource allocation. Users can filter reports for specific workers, departments, teams, or projects.
Project and Portfolio Management
ServiceNow Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) assists organizations in aligning tasks to business goals, ensuring managers that teams are getting things done. The PPM program offers greater visibility via real-time dashboards and reporting features.
Professional Package
The professional package, on the other hand, includes the aforementioned standard package tools plus the following:
Innovation Management
Innovation Management helps organizations share and analyze ideas via collaboration channels. Team members, management, and even customers can contribute ideas through face-to-face brainstorming sessions, online forums, and other web-based applications.
Scaled Agile Framework
Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) are a value-first method for scaling business frameworks to the enterprise level and maintaining customer service standards as companies expand.
SAFe supports business agility across all core competencies. It also assists large corporations in directing teams toward company-wide strategic goals, not just specific group or individual goals.
Agile Management
ServiceNow Agile Development tools allow teams to manage development work throughout a project’s lifecycle, driving agile portfolios via streamlined execution to expedite product and service delivery.
It includes pre-configured agile dashboards for evaluating trends, status, and job details. Agile Management is a unified backlog for managing workflows in a single view and sprint tracking via a visual task board.
Test Management
Test management is the process of organizing and overseeing testing methodologies to ensure top-notch and high-end software application analysis.
Creating high-quality software tests requires planning and providing testing traceability and transparency. These safeguards help facilitate a smooth testing process.
Any test management system might include the following features:
- Provide support for test case templates
- Ability to organize and maintain requirements, features, and use-cases
- Write, edit, and run test cases
- Monitor for defects, improvements, risks, and related issues
- Integrate automated unit, functional, and load testing tools from a variety of suppliers
- Provide user-friendly web interfaces with mobile device support
Cask Can Help You Make the Right Choice For Your Business
Implementing ServiceNow ITBM solutions will help you maximize data and analytic metrics value to boost business service visibility and minimize expenses. ServiceNow ITBM helps organizations improve project and demand management effectiveness while balancing and properly allocating limited resources.
Request a quote today to learn more about ServiceNow ITBM standard and professional packages and how each can help you get the most out of your IT and business services.
