Manage up in ServiceNow.

Gain better executive visibility and stakeholder communication in ServiceNow.

When managing large PMO portfolios in ServiceNow, we know that efficient communication with all your portfolio stakeholders is important. Perhaps the most elusive group to keep involved are your executives, which includes your executive project sponsors.

Executives have a lot of information coming at them each week - between managing large teams and multiple areas of business priorities it’s key to your project and portfolio success to figure out how to engage this audience regularly and in a consistent format. They are the pivotal decision makers and they manage all the resources, so keeping them up to speed on project health and demand intake is crucial to getting what you need to keep your portfolio on track.

So what do executives care to see in their ServiceNow PMO status and demand reporting?

In what format? How often do they want updates? Some executives want to be fed information while others are OK with seeking it out on their own when they have questions, making a self-service pull ServiceNow reporting dashboard a valuable add-on to your ServiceNow reporting capabilities.

Steering committee meetings are a great way to stay in front of your ServiceNow portfolio status and needs, but those meetings are typically once a month and require a massive amount of effort to get project data into a consumable format and then onto PowerPoint slides (the delivery method of choice for executives the world over). You should be exploring the most efficient way to process your ServiceNow data and have it be available to present at a moment’s notice.

We’ve seen a lot of ways to accomplish this efficiency and some are, let’s say, less than efficient.

To ensure stakeholder buy-in at every step and increase executive visibility into wins, needs and obstacles, it is best to consider the following elements in any good ServiceNow PMO reporting plan:

1. Can we easily standardize the format across the PMO?
2. How do we ensure flexibility in access and timing of reports?
3. How can we minimize the effort required to create reports without additional manipulation external to ServiceNow?

The tried and true method of exporting ServiceNow data to Excel, manipulating that data (cleaning it up and making it visually pleasing) and then copying/pasting into PowerPoint seems like a no-cost solution using tools you already have, but the effort involved in creating these external reports takes your PMO resources away from driving projects to completion and delivering results.

In some ways, utilizing your internal BI development team can accomplish the goals above by standardizing dashboards and aggregating data, but you’ll still be pulling data out of ServiceNow and into another platform - taking users away from ServiceNow and risking your maximum potential for user adoption. In addition, BI teams often have competing priorities and too many requests with too few resources, meaning they struggle to make impactful changes on the fly (you’ll be relegated to the backlog).

Not to mention, BI developers are highly paid, prized resources and their time is expensive. According to Gartner and their Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2022 survey results, data architects and those with the skills to manage complex data sets like ServiceNow are getting increasingly difficult to hire.

The VividCharts co-founders knew these were pressing problems that large ServiceNow customers had no help solving - so they created the solution: an in-platform ServiceNow reporting platform that makes your reporting both standardized and efficient.

Customers are raving about how much time and effort this has saved them -

“VividCharts gave us an opportunity to build a comprehensive status report and to look at everything in ServiceNow as a data element that can be captured, configured and presented in a visually pleasing and branded way for Teradata.”

Christina Williams PMO Director - Information Technology & Procurement

If you are ready to level up your ServiceNow PPM reporting and make it the easiest part of your project and portfolio managers’ workflow, let us show you how VividCharts has helped large enterprise customers save thousands of resource hours annually on ServiceNow project reporting - lightweight implementation and export to PowerPoint included!