How to Boost Project Management with ServiceNow Performance Analytics

Most companies are focused on implementing an agile project management methodology that's cost efficient. Despite defining a vast list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), the challenge still remains: increasing costs and reduced efficiencies. ServiceNow Performance Analytics comes with strong project performance tuning strategies to scale up  efficiencies at optimized costs.

Problems with Legacy Project Management Processes

In most cases, project management efforts are consumed by calculating:

• Whether the project is running on schedule
• The causes of project disruptions
• The Impact of disruptions on project timelines and cost

Despite having tools that collect these cause and effect data points, project managers are often unable to connect these observations to make intelligent conclusions. This is primarily due to the lack of alignment of business objectives or goals with the project management strategy.

Those that align their Enterprise PMO to strategy, report 38 percent more projects meet original goals and business intent and 33 percent fewer projects are deemed failures."

-Pulse of the Profession Survey, PMI.

Alignment issues arise due to the lack of a systematic approach in recording and interpreting project management data. Analytics are key for business leaders to check whether the project aligned with business goals or not. But, most of the time data comes from analysts in silos and is only shared during board meetings. Essentially, data is unavailable to those who really need it. This results in the following consequences:

• When the data is not available in real-time the decision-making process is effected. Decisions made from old data cannot be relied on.
• Data stored in silos lack context. Extracting insights from a heap of data requires many hours of analysts' time which increases cost.
• Analysts can spend  hours searching through project histories to locate  where problems have occurred during a given project. This time could have been spent solving the problem.  
• In this fast-paced digital-first business environment, not staying up-to-date with advancements in technology will make it impossible to compete.
• A single organization can handle hundreds of projects. Often times an organization's senior management want information on different projects. The reality is often that there is no adequate data to analyze and instead management must look through spreadsheets.

...every $1 billion invested in the United States, $122 million was wasted due to lacking project performance”

-PMI Research

Performance Analytics for Better Project Management

ServiceNow Performance Analytics can track, aggregate, and visualize key performance indicators over time, rather than reporting on just a point in time. This allows for in-depth analytics and more visibility.

No Data Stays Dormant 

ServiceNow Performance Analytics decentralizes data silos and makes the data  easily accessible to authorized team members. Thus resulting in transforming the data strategy to be completely agile. This eases the process of identifying and positioning key data components that must be evaluated across all projects. Performance analytics dashboards provide flexibility in choosing which data points to monitor.

Driving Organization Goals with Transparency

Extensive analytics allows business leaders to plan, measure, evaluate and restructure KPIs. Based on this data, business leaders gain better visibility of overall commitments. Accordingly, management can re-strategize their efforts to meet their goals. The beauty of PA is that stakeholders have access to meaningful insights on hundreds of projects their organization is handling without needing a team of analysts to create dozens of spreadsheets and charts. This way performance analytics enhances transparency, governance, and accountability.

Monitoring and Predicting Risk

ServiceNow PA is a machine learning driven analytics platform that can predict the probability of risk occurrence and helps the project team to counter and manage risks in advance. 

Intelligent Resource Utilization and Communication

In-depth analytics on resource utilization gives management access to statistics such as working hours and time spent on each task. This information allows the stakeholders to manage their employees and resources at their highest capabilities to run a project successfully. This improves cross-organizational collaboration. 

(Learn how to determine if ServiceNow Performance Analytics is right for your business. Click here.)