A Practitioner's Guide to Strategic Portfolio Management
Eight years inside ServiceNow's SPM product, supporting hundreds of real customer environments, distilled into one field-tested playbook. Not a rewrite of the documentation: the book that tells you what actually works, what quietly fails, and why.
BUY ON AMAZONProcess first, platform second. Every chapter pairs the discipline with the configuration, so both sides of the house finally read the same book.
Idea and demand management that filters work instead of queueing it, with decision velocity instead of thousand-item backlogs.
Portfolio prioritization, scenario planning, and the honest funding line: comparing investments instead of collecting them.
Resource and financial management that works: capacity math, cost plans, forecasts, and the hygiene habits that keep them true.
Waterfall, agile, and hybrid delivery in one portfolio, with honest status reporting and roll-ups leadership can trust.
The Australia release's AI capabilities: demand triage agents, generated plans and status drafts, and the readiness work that makes them useful.
A technical architect's playbook: configuration over customization, environment strategy, integrations, security, and performance at scale.
Two parts. Part I for the mixed audience of process owners and platform people. Part II written architect to architect, and considerably more technical.
The three questions SPM answers continuously, and what the suite is (and isn't).
The tables, workspaces, and platform joins underneath everything else.
Ideas to demands to decisions, with a worked end-to-end example and the AI triage desk.
The funnel, prioritization that sticks, scenario planning, and when programs earn their keep.
WBS, baselines, the planning console, honest status, and closure done right.
Three integration patterns and the reporting bridge between backlogs and boardrooms.
The hardest discipline in the suite, with the capacity math worked in full.
Cost plans, budgets, actuals, forecasts, and the benefits half of the ledger everyone forgets.
Cascading goals to work, and roadmaps published from live data.
Three tiers of evidence plus a starter metric catalog.
The phased adoption roadmap, the failure catalog, and the first ninety days.
The four conversations and decision rights that keep an SPM practice alive.
Administration rhythms, upgrades without drama, and a support engineer's diagnostic instincts.
What the Australia release actually changes, and the guardrails for governing the machine.
The five-rung configuration ladder, and why configuration over customization is a scalability law.
The instance stack, source control for JavaScript shops, and boring releases.
Foundation data, the CMDB dividend, and integrations designed for the bad day.
Shipped roles before custom ACLs, auditability by design, and licensing as architecture.
Where instances actually slow down, and the triage runbook that finds it fast.
The technical readiness checklist behind every AI capability worth enabling.
Foundations to cutover weekend to the first thirty days, ending with the architect's dozen.
Core tables, exception reports, the demand form starter set, a glossary, the configuration-or-customization quick reference, and the architect's pre-flight checklist.
"Volume is not health. Decision velocity is health. The organizations that thrived were rarely the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest configurations. They were the ones who decided what they wanted to know, agreed on who would keep which data true, started small, and reviewed relentlessly."
Get the playbook that turns ServiceNow SPM from a license into an operating model.
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