V-Soft uses several custom ServiceNow applications to meet our business process needs (and those of our clients). Here we go into depth on a few of those ServiceNow implementations with initial reference points to help you follow.

Custom Implementations Designed from ServiceNow's Project Portfolio Suite

• V-Soft Contact Manager collects information about companies and their representatives to share between all of V-Soft’s custom applications
• Proposal Tracker is used in the sales department to track drafting, submission, and recording results of proposals and RFPs they create
• Commission and Invoice Tracker auto-generates invoices and commission information and sends the details to our accounting software
• Expense Tracker is a custom application with a native mobile application for capturing expenses and managing expense approval and reimbursement

V-Soft’s Business Solutions team uses these out-of-the-box (OOB) ServiceNow applications to manage projects: Demand Management, Project Portfolio Suite with Financials, Agile Development, Test Management, Resource Management, Time Cards, Release Management, and Reports.

Proposal Tracker Through Project Management 

Information comes into the flow from several sources. When a proposal in Proposal Tracker is for a Business Solutions project, a demand record is automatically generated. All other prospective projects require that the demand be created manually, because most sales are tracked in different software.

The demand is used to scope the project, estimate time and resources, and verify the stakeholders and requirements. This corresponds to the inception phase of the project. After the resources have been requested, the requirements verified, and the demand fully evaluated by the practice head, approval is given. We have found that the requirements section of the demand record is particularly useful when evaluating an RFP. Each requirement in the RFP is created, and evaluated separately. This granularity has been wonderful when evaluating the viability of bidding on large projects.

During the demand phase of a project, time is logged directly to the demand. After the demand has been approved and resources allocated, the demand is used to create a project record. Business Solutions use a script to apply a template to the project and create a series of required project tasks for tracking time. Example project tasks include internal meetings, client meetings, documentation (by ISO document type), etc. Business Solutions doesn’t currently make use of project phases, but it would be easy to incorporate them into this script. Each of these specific tasks have their own templates that are then applied to provide consistency across projects.

A “product” record is also created for tracking releases and specifying who at V-Soft is the subject matter expert.

A new engagement record is also auto-generated in the Commission and Invoice Tracker application. This is where information such as billing terms, how billing rates are determined (time and materials or a set amount), and the various types of contacts, addresses and other contact information are recorded. This information will be used by Commission and Invoice Tracker to automatically generate invoices for the project at the specified interval.

While developing, Business Solutions makes heavy usage of the Agile Development application suite. All programming tasks are created as stories, bundled into sprints, and assigned to developers by their team leads. Bugs are tracked using Defects and change requests are evaluated using Enhancements. When a story is completed, the developer re-assigns it to the team lead for evaluation. If the work is acceptable the team lead updates the status and assigns it to a member of the QA team assigned to the project. Once testing is complete the story is reassigned to the team lead and marked complete.

The QA Team uses Test Management to plan and implement testing for the project. QA is an occult and bewildering practice to me, so I will leave their involvement to someone better versed in their arts.

When development and UAT has completed, a record is made in Release Management and the stories that were completed are assigned. This will serve as a record moving forward for the history of a product, and this is essential for turning personal knowledge into institutional knowledge and preserving it through staffing changes.

Time logging is very important to any organization concerned with efficiency and accountability – not only to the customer, but internally, too. It is for this reason that V-Soft tracks time at the most granular level possible – stories, defects, enhancements, and project tasks. We make extensive use of the time worked field’s stopwatch function. Tracking at this level is not only beneficial to the customer, but it prevents telecommuting employees from parking time. For example, there is no reason why a junior developer, with no contact with the client, to have spent twenty hours in one week on client calls, or any time on a closed project.

Time card data is scavenged and processed by Commission and Invoice Tracker and used to generate invoices for time and materials projects, and calculate the gross margin for determining commissions. These values are captured and held for historical reasons. The intelligence this generates has been instrumental in helping the Business Solutions team become more profitable since Commission and Invoice Tracker was implemented.

Invoices and Commissions within ServiceNow's Project Portfolio Suite

Invoices and Commission information is reviewed by the VP of Business Solutions to double check the information. Upon approval, the invoice and commission information is sent to our accounting software. Project-expenses are tracked with Expense Tracker for when expenses are covered by the client.

V-Soft also makes use of an integration with DocuSign for documents that require signatures for legal reasons, such as expenses. In this case, only after the correct parties have signed the document is it sent to our accounting software. We’ve done integrations for QuickBooks, Dynamix, and NetSuite as our company has grown and changed.

Transitioning from more mature project management solutions like Jira for ServiceNow has not been easy. However, it has been worth the effort, and the integrations across departmental boundaries is bearing sweet, sweet ROI. 

The moral of this story is that the more we poured into ServiceNow, the more we have gotten in return."  

-V-Soft ServiceNow Project Manager

The added efficiency and forcing best practices through workflows has reduced problems, made billing more reliable, and allowed for collecting intelligence on where we need improvement.

Continual process improvement may be a buzzword in manufacturing, but the Theory of Constraints can apply to any process – even software development – and since implementing ServiceNow, V-Soft has the data to identify the bottlenecks and process breakdowns necessary to grow faster, better, and produce solutions for our clients we can be proud of.