hello and thank you for joining us I'm Deborah McGrath principal product marketing engineer with servicenow and last Thursday's host joining us live from the agile 2023 conference in Orlando we're thrilled to be joined by Fred Champlain who's our own service now agile evangelist Fred is actually a safe practice consultant who joined service now after spending 15 years at IBM working on digital transformation for clients across several Industries in this webinar you'll be discussing digital transformation with scaled agile framework lean portfolio management While most of what we'll be discussing and showing are features that are available with our Utah release this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that reflect the current beliefs of servicenow all based on current information available actual results May differ materially and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions during today's webinar Fred will be discussing some of the common questions that everyone has about key reasons organizations are moving to scale digital framework this will be followed by a discussion of how servicenow supports portfolio safe and lean portfolio management he'll also talk about the importance of goals and okrs Fred will share some guidance on how to handle release cycles and minimum marketable features or MMS in the continuous delivery pipeline we'll take a look at how SPM supports safe operational value streams and he'll provide a sneak peek at some exciting capabilities coming in the future including product feedback and gen AI and we'll wrap with a look at upcoming events and we'll save a little time at the end for Q a and now I'd like to welcome Fred well thank you Deborah it's a pleasure to be here with everyone today um very excited to uh talk and and share uh we're safe and SPM fit together so um these are great topics I'm looking forward to a good discussion here awesome oh subscribe before we jump into your presentation would you be able to tell us what's been happening at the agile Alliance conference yeah absolutely yeah yeah so I'm at the agile 2023 conference in Orlando Florida um there's a few trends that that uh being at the show here for four days now very clear that there's an interest in portfolios um that's been a trend but but really it's prominent this year uh as organizations have matured and in various ways of adopting agile and implementing agile maybe sometimes re-implementing uh everyone's maturing at this point they're interested in the things that they need to do to scale up agile to to run a portfolio to fund a portfolio so it's really exciting to see that thanks for sharing that Fred I've got a couple questions for you so much of what we do here at servicenow is cross-functional involving multiple teams planning and executing work over multiple quarters all while enabling Executives to understand our overall status or the big picture if you will at any point in time is that one of the key reasons people are moving to scale digital to enable everyone to better see the bigger picture one other question servicenow supports portfolio safe and LPM that's really our sweet spot what are the common challenges that drive our customers to implement a lean portfolio well the the the portfolio as you can see here and just for reference and give us a context since this um conversations around safe but this can apply really in any way of scaling uh agile safe happens to be one way of doing it and companies will will use safe or not you safe or maybe they're inspired by by some of the the concepts and principles unsafe um so companies as you look at this kind of from bottom up typically is is how companies have adopted agile practices and and over time they Aggregate and and pull together into teams of teams sometimes teams of teams of teams and eventually they have a need for a portfolio however also some companies more so recently will start at a top level and and also Implement a portfolio along with implementing agile with teams as well and the reason they're the the need for for agile and scaling agile is really driven from from as you can see and the the big picture here um for business agility we'll talk a lot more about that but business is generally business agility really responding to demands in the marketplace so companies are are responding and finding new ways to work in a more aligned manner a more efficient manner and and in a way that's aligned to customers these are the things that really make for competitiveness in the marketplace whether it's a product or a service whether it's consumer whether it's a business to business uh almost anything needs to be customer-centric at this point so by pulling together from a number of of good practices if you will and Concepts we can look at how to execute in a more aligned manner that that really brings products to Market earlier and and thus we're delivering value to to customers earlier as well I have a simpler question for you can you comment on the importance of goals and okrs for business agility I know it's a huge Focus for servicenow I'm just wondering your thoughts yeah I okay it goes in okrs are are fundamental to aligning Investments so why don't we um take a look here and what we're going to do today is is really uh look at where in in our in SPM how we relate um our functionality to to save so first of all we're very customer-centric and we're always thinking about value being delivered and that's the underlying theme uh of all of what we're doing so we can't lose sight of that so as you can see here beginning with strategy we use goals and okrs to really guide the prioritization decisions that we make in terms of how we fund and invest uh in in products and services and and this results in a strategic roadmap that we work with and and we execute from as we build and and so the okrs in particular are very popular um it's it's a goal framework um and by using okrs we're able to really have a trans apparent way to share and align around common goals and and it also allows us to Monitor and make adjustments along the way one of the critical themes in in reasons for scaling up agile is that fundamentally we are working to reduce our cycle time or our time to bring new features to a market because we need to learn from customers faster of what their needs are we need to make those improvements and we'll look at how we do that but fundamentally we use okrs to really keep us on track and also to understand when we're not on track and it also guides Us in in the types of adjustments we need to make so if we look at how we do this you can see in SPM that we have the capability here of on our goals framework uh and and by the way we use okrs here today because a they're they're popular B also safe is an advocate of okrs but there are other goal Frameworks and and some companies and Enterprises um uh use a combination of goals uh that they may have their own approach um maybe they're using a hybrid with with okrs and we could accommodate any and all of those we have a very flexible goal framework that we can use and and here you can see uh goals and then some targets here for example so we have Baseline targets uh and and so we have a very accommodating way and and this will allow customers to move from maybe their approach if they're interested in adopting okrs or there's other Frameworks that people are using as well so these are the guiding parameters if you will that allow us to revisit to Monitor and to make continuous prioritization decisions that we'll talk about in a few minutes so as we look at um planning we can see here from a priority perspective that we have opportunities for investment and and so what we want to do is align the roadmap using these okrs and being driven from an okr perspective so when we say Okay arts and I'm objective and and several typically a handful of key results informed from kpis if you're familiar with kpis so here we can see that we've got a roadmap with the planning and then we can see across the top are objectives as well so 20 reduction technical debt and these are Milestones on this particular roadmap in a digital transformation for example and we've got new objectives of becoming a number one digital Financial provider build an inclusive Enterprise Delight customers these are our representative of frequent top-level goals in an organization that we're looking both from a revenue or performance perspective we're thinking about inclusivity from an employee perspective or thinking about delighting customers as well so as we move and look at from a goals and a strategy and a roadmap perspective we also have to be very um aware of our Enterprise architecture because after all we're building digital products and those digital products have have what safe refers to as an architectural Runway so as we think about our planning we have to make decisions around not only the product itself but also the underlying Technologies because frequently this is where dependencies lie and and those dependencies can become blockers and one one of the critical aspects of scaling is managing dependencies that's one of the hardest aspects of building up an agile organization and and is managing those dependencies anticipating them and frequently many of these dependencies are are Technology based soon safe it's essential that we have Architects at the table and Architects have um of course models and business capabilities that they work from and the applications that support those business capabilities so it's very important to have uh information at hand to inform their decisions on forming and maintaining the architectural Runway that's a key concept and safe so how we do that is we have APM for example uh in our Enterprise architecture workspace where we can look at the business capabilities and for for example here you can see that we have a mix of capabilities and an application called digital wallet so by looking at the the fitness if you will of that application and the capabilities from a TBM perspective we can make decisions on what's the best course of action in in building out and prioritizing for our architectural Runway so here as we look at our strategy and we think about demand across the portfolio that portfolio has several intakes from employees from customers from ideas uh and and also of course we have service and application owners that have their needs as well for operational enhancements we may have some new epics that we need to bring in to the pipeline into demand we also have product feedback we'll talk about that a little bit later we have some product ideas as well and and we bring all of this together business relationship managers work together with product owners product management and Architects to really look at this demand pipeline which we then pull into a planning process so here we have an uh ideation so looking at our ideas portal of how we can actually bring these potential enhancements together and and look at them uh for candidates that we can bring into our our demand ultimately these May land into a lean portfolio backlog for prioritization so from a digital portfolio management perspective we can look at those capabilities and and importantly understand what those dependencies are so we want to always be cognizant of dependencies um in the so digital portfolio management gives us that capability as well as combined with application portfolio management these are the critical Tools in in terms of maintaining that architectural Runway and making decisions that really are are meant to ensure that we don't have um difficult blockers to resolve so as we have our demand we've we've got our architecture we have our strategy and a strategic roadmap we've got our initiatives we really go in and plan and this Cadence or the frequency of of this planning is continuous many companies are are moving from annual planning into quarterly planning so really the monitoring and the execution is on a continuous basis and and having an integrated system is critical to keeping this on track and having the goals and okrs available to do that so at this Point we've got the alignment is so critical and this is where we're putting together a pmo Enterprise pmo perhaps or a value management office typically we've got a number of parties this might be also where we have the value stream leaders uh if if you're organized by value stream uh we have of course as I mentioned Architects so this is also where and safe that we would do PI planning for example would be one of the activities that that falls into a line and then continuous delivery as well from that so as we look at this from a LPM perspective we would think maybe about quarterly business reviews and and the activities that are involved in updating the portfolio and making portfolio decisions on on what to invest in do we continue investing uh in in a feature for example or do we stop investing maybe it's not turning out the way that we anticipated we can look at the the portfolio from from multiple lenses so here you can see business capability for architects in the middle you can see a product lens for product managers and and over to the right you can see a value stream a view which looked like this here in terms of looking at the the transformation roadmap looking at the the backlog to prioritize all work together so you can see the types of work here in Epic a safe epic a project a demand so this gives us a a comprehensive view so we can holistically look at our investment and make decisions that are coordinated and aligned and that's what will allow us to to have better decision making more responsive decision making here we have a roadmap looking at how we can do this independent of the methodology you can see the Strategic objective and build an exclusive inclusive Delight customers as we saw earlier you see demands maybe scrum epics and and safe epics together here uh and then you can see the dependencies and again dependencies are are really the critical items that we're looking for this is one of the the major benefits of doing Pi planning uh and working with an architectural Runway is that we can see these and visualize these uh using SPM so as we look through a lens we can look at the epics Associated to particular product for example so we can isolate this into a particular product and see what what is on the roadmap here and again you can see the dependencies as well so for this bank loan application we have a customer engagement Center integration apis that support that and we'll build those apis uh we'll build a loan application that are then tied into the engagement Center so you can see those dependencies here along with some Milestones so we've got pi1 and pi2 so as we think about delivery oh Fred I just wanted to actually chime in here and sure one of the things that you mentioned earlier was reducing cycle times and this kind of hits home for me personally as a servicenow content creator I develop a lot of product and solution videos and the impact of our accelerated release cycle with frequent delivery of new features from our own agile teams and arts it's hard to keep up sometimes what's your guidance about minimum marketable features and the continuous delivery Pipeline and the impact this has on the organization both good and bad sure the the concept of what was called a minimal marketable feature and sometimes people will refer to this as a minimal marketable product the idea is that we don't want to build out things that are too big that take too long we want to get smaller chunks or iterations or increments out to the market out to our customers we want them to see value sooner than later so the idea is that we want to also get their feedback we want to learn from their feedback and make adjustments we want to make several adjustments along the way we want to work smaller if you will so that's a critical uh aspect of scaling agile and also being responsive to the market as markets become increasingly faster paced we will need to continue to to find ways of building smaller pieces of functionality delivering those quickly and listening and Gathering the feedback from customers so a good example that we all mostly experience is applications on your mobile phone whether you have an Android or an iPhone you are receive application updates uh daily and and so whether you've got it auto set and you might not notice it so much but your applications are updating and if you track any particular application you'll notice that there's frequently a Cadence of a week or or every two weeks which generally corresponds to a Sprint from those development teams sometimes an application May update more or I should say less frequently maybe on a quarterly basis and that that corresponds to organizations that are planning on a quarterly basis releasing on a quarterly basis so we actually all as consumers have have a red ready reference in our hands literally of where agile and typically scale agile is being used all those mobile applications they have an Enterprise architecture associated with them there's apis and databases in the background a lot of infrastructure and Cloud typically of course and and so all of that is being updated in a very short time frame of a couple weeks so that is the challenge for us is how do we scale that up it's it's easy to do as a startup it's harder to do as you're an Enterprise an organization and do that in a coordinated way and that's what we're looking at here as you look at strategize and aligning aligning is so critical looking at a central demand pipeline is critical so as we look at delivering here of course we can deliver with a a central demand uh we have a universal backlog that we can bring all work together so here you see where we can even include defects and security items and we can consider risk as well as the traditional as you think about epics and features and stories as well as for servicenow we can also look at programs and projects as well so we have a very powerful mechanism to bring this together in a true portfolio View and and apply the same capacity management resourcing and prioritization together so here you can see Sprints of course in terms of how we coordinate our work this is for looking at a safe Agile Release Train looking at the the stories in this particular view for for the pi1 for the loan offerings enhancements art so this is part of the loan and origination value stream and of course you can see dependencies here so this is a look at when we're planning our work and delivering and executing our work uh of uh what this looks like uh it's all from a safe perspective we would typically see you can see here stories and also features with Arts being the the vehicle for future delivery and then when we look at features aggregating up into uh epics now also we're able to integrate into Jiro software and Azure devops as well so from a portfolio perspective we can also be an umbrella into other systems that are managing work and we can bring together and use the advantages of LPM to plan and then distribute back the stories for example that may be actually in xero software and to get updates in a bi-directional real-time integration for both zero software and azure devops so as we start releasing and we we build our our application of course we're thinking about release management and using sir devops in a CI CD tool chain I'll again typically cloud-based we're looking at when to release to be competitive and we think about our time frame of our builds we really need to have smaller increments of work going out to customers so by having a tight release management system a high quality automated devops pipeline that enables us to quickly get product and value out to customers and as we do release we do find obviously there's there's incidents that occur there's also feedback items that come back in as well and we can again bring that back into our our work and into our backlogs to be prioritized ultimately we're doing this all of this work to understand how are we impacting our okrs so what we want to look at here is a delivery I'll track our status of course see where we're at and in correspondingly understand where there might be issues and blockers that we need to attend to and Fred in support of Lee Nigel we focus on program execution and continuous Improvement through feedback Cycles closing the loop back to strategy and we have a new product feedback application coming out with our Vancouver release how do you see that benefiting our customers well that's going to be a tremendous um uh use of generative AI so as we see here uh we've got the ability to look at benefits realization which closes our our loop back to okrs and you can see here we can track progress so if we think about these additional capabilities and again I'm thinking from a safe harbor perspective this is all in development and subject to change so if we look at the feedback uh we'll really make this a more efficient process this can be an overwhelming process for product managers in particular of having so much feedback and so generative AI will allow us to really look at the trends and to essentially do grouping um of ideas and bring those and surface those automatically so we can actually spend time elsewhere we can see here for example the auto tagging facial recognition um are are the top items that we want to think about prioritizing and funding so this way we can very quickly take customer feedback customer sentiment and pull that back in to their strategic planning process closing that Loop and then going again and doing another Pi for example for another quarter so we can bring new functionality and new value to customers Deborah next we have several events and resources on Thursday August 31st our monthly last Thursday's webinar will be 30 minutes with Chris Canela and Aaron Roberts enhancements to our Resource Management capabilities before that on August 23rd live on L will present an APM webinar on future State modeling and on August 29th we have an APM Workshop to enable you to get more value from your application portfolio management efforts by leveraging the service out Enterprise architecture workspace you can register for these live on servicenle events at community.servicenow.com under events and please note that you can view this safe webinar again and access any of our prior last Thursday's webinars on demand from our YouTube playlist last Thursdays with SPM webinars for additional resources please visit our SPM safe and agile product pages at servicenow.com products slash scaled agile framework or servicealler.com Agile development Fred again wealth of information really appreciate it thank you to John Lim co-producer of our last Thursday's webinar and of course thank you so much to our last Thursday's audience for taking time to join us we'll see you on our next last Thursday's webinar