What’s new in Rome?
The Rome upgrade, which will be ready in September 2021, does not mean only improvement and automation capabilities to work faster and more efficiently for admins and end-users, but it also has a great variety of additional features for department leads and process managers. In this article, we prepared a list of the most exciting improvements from the business perspective.
ITSM – Digital Portfolio Management
Service, Product, and Application Owners will finally have a unified place for managing the entire portfolio of their offerings. This new unified Workspace will be provided via ServiceNow Store at no additional cost, except for the corresponding ITSM/ITBM.
A single place where you can track and manage the lifecycle of your Services, Applications, and Products will give you great insight into your portfolio from a high-level perspective, which is invaluable, knowing how complex and intricate those things can be.
ITSM – Workforce Optimization Enhancements
Source: SPOC
Workforce managers and admins will have new capabilities within their workspace, enhancing Scheduling possibilities, managing their teams’ KPIs, and providing Coaching options to Agents.
Forecast admins will modify Forecast Parameters from the workspace to verify and compare different forecast versions. They can also fine-tune the forecasts manually, adjusting the default forecast properties for greater accuracy.
Shift planning admins can add on-call shifts from a Shift tab or the calendar. They can swap shifts of agents’ within their teams without a need for additional approval and view their agents’ demand and utilization for each day of the week.
KPIs can be added for teams and individual agents, goals can be set to track and monitor how teams and respective agents deal with, e.g., incident resolution. Multiple teams can be given the same set of KPIs/Goals for consistency.
Assessments and Surveys are now available in the manager workspace. Surveys can be added automatically to an assessment when the coaching opportunity triggers it or manually ad-hoc. Skills can be analyzed in the Skills Overview and added to teams, and assigned to individual agents.
All in all, this provides excellent insight and a unified tool for workforce optimization, which is a pretty unique offering in the marketplace.
ITSM – Vendor Manager Workspace
Another Workspace-based enhancement will provide Vendor Managers with a great tool for tracking their Vendors’ performance.
The Rome release adds a new landing page to that Workspace for a unified view of your contracts, improvement initiatives, ranking of Vendors’ performance against their success characteristics, and Vendor satisfaction scores. Improvement Initiatives are a new way to track the Vendor’s improvement of a service, process, or tasks assigned in a structured way. You will also be able to manage the Service Credits that particular Vendors owe you when they are in breach of their Service Level Agreements and view the details of the breaches, analyzing the incidents, outages, and general service availability.
Source: ServiceNow
CSM – Messaging Services
Knowing that paperwork, analysis and approvals are the biggest hurdles in getting things done, ServiceNow offers pre-negotiated SMS and WhatsApp messaging deals.
You can order messaging credits with a separate SKU and leave all the setup to ServiceNow. This additional offering can be added to any of your existing CSM packages.
The messaging is handled by the industry-leading company Twilio, which is no surprise.
CSM – Playbooks
Playbooks are now even more focused on the current task at hand. The layout has been modified to provide contextual information, depending on the type of task the Agent currently handles within the Playbook. Thanks to that, Agents resolve issues more quickly and efficiently.
Playbooks can now be used for an entire workflow, including record creation. The corresponding playbook activity will be triggered, e.g., when a CSM Agent creates a new Case record, prompting them to gather additional information about the customer and their case.
The focused playbook activity view allows the Agents to see the entire workflow, focusing on the current stage and activity. The lifecycle panel displays the workflow stages and following tasks, while the main work area covers the current task’s content.
Dynamic related records can also be configured and displayed, eliminating jumping through multiple screens/tabs.
Source: ServiceNow
HR – Employee Center
The Employee Center is a new portal for your end users within ServiceNow, centralizing the experience from various departments like HR, IT, Legal, or Procurement.
It supports omnichannel self-service and support for your employees to make their experience the best possible. This modern, employee-focused environment boosts end users’ productivity and efficiency and empowers them to solve their issues.
You can easily link the HR Case ticket page with your Employee Center using the provided Portal Configuration module.
Note that if you sed an older version of the Employee Center, you will be advised to download the latest app from the ServiceNow Store. The app is supposed to be getting frequent updates and new features.
Source: SPOC
HR – Employee Journey Management
Managers and department leads can now create complex Employee Journeys, which span multiple departments for increased employee productivity, efficiency, and engagement.
Based on templates, dedicated workflows, and interactions, you can offer your Employees a personalized experience, measuring their satisfaction throughout their journey during the critical transitions.
Employee Mentors can support Employees within respective Journey Accelerator plans by managing, updating, and tracking to-do tasks.
The configuration starts with defining a new Plan type, for example, “Employee Relocation.” Plans contain various Stages as well as to-do Tasks. Task templates allow you to specify unique triggers for each task type. You can define the different stakeholders’ levels of access (Managers, Mentors, End Users). Managers will then use the defined Plan Types to create new Plans for specific Employees, assign Mentors, etc.
Source: SPOC
Source: SPOC
IT Asset Management – Asset Health Dashboard
The Asset Health addition to Hardware Asset Dashboard leverages ServiceNow’s single-source-of-truth platform and provides insights into the overall health of your Hardware Assets.
Asset Managers can receive recommended actions, alerts and gain insights based on the Asset’sAsset’s health. The dashboard comes with reports focused on the health and compliance of hardware asset records. It allows to identify any risks with Assets from Hardware or Consumable models which fall into one of the below categories:
- missing purchase information,
- could not be discovered within a month or are missing,
- scheduled for retirement/nearing end-of-life/requiring refresh,
- having most frequent incidents.
It is easy to filter the above database on Asset model or Location.
Source: ServiceNow
All roads lead to Rome
By the end of the year, you will be able to take advantage of all new improvements in the Rome release. You will have one place for your entire portfolio of the offerings for better tracking and insights. The scheduling and managing teams’ KPIs will become more smooth due to Workforce Optimization Enhancements. You will also get additional Workspace for tracking your Vendors’ performance, with significant analysis options.
Messaging Services will add more speed to getting things done. Your work will be quicker as well in CSM due to enhancements in Playbooks, and the HR process will be supported by the Employee Center and improvement in the Employee Journeys.
Are you interested in the upgrade? Contact us!
Explore Rome ServiceNow Release for Admins, Developers, and Security Teams.
