Are you tired of managing incidents in one module, changes in another, problems somewhere else, while user stories and tasks live in entirely different tools?
Do your teams constantly switch contexts or lose visibility across all these different work tools they are using?
What if all work – operational, agile, and ad-hoc – could live in one unified platform?
With Collaborative Work Management (CWM) in ServiceNow, that vision is becoming reality.
As one of the early adopters of this new product, ITCE has had the opportunity to explore its capabilities, overcome its challenges, and help organizations modernize the way they manage work.
A Brief Introduction to CWM
CWM is a centralized workspace that allows teams to manage all their work in one place. Boards within CWM function as unified backlogs, where records from any task-based table in the ServiceNow Platform – stories, incidents, changes, requests, and tasks – can be displayed together in a single interface.
Each team within the organization has its own board tailored to its needs. Additionally, CWM introduces the innovative My Work board, which brings together every task assigned to the user in a single interface. This approach to work management vastly reduces context switching and improves visibility across different types of work.
ITCE’s Implementation Journey
While CWM can be used as a standalone tool, ServiceNow best practice recommends combining it with Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) for a complete agile framework and with ITSM for IT operations activities. EAP enables company-level agile planning, where Planning Interval (PI) and OKRs are defined, along with Epics, Features, Stories, and Sprints. CWM, on the other hand, focuses on team-level agile planning and execution. Connecting EAP with CWM allows managers, product owners, and team members to plan and execute sprints, complete user stories and operational work all within the same workspace.
By integrating CWM and EAP, teams no longer need to jump between tools, thus minimizing disruptions and keeping both planned and unplanned work visible in one place. This ensures that day-to-day execution stays aligned with broader strategic objectives. As a result, leadership can clearly see progress toward OKRs through EAP, while teams using CWM have the flexibility to adapt to changing priorities.
Challenges Faced During Implementation
Despite its numerous benefits and innovative approach to managing work, CWM is still in its infancy as a ServiceNow product. During our implementation journey for our first CWM client, we identified several limitations.
- Manual Integration between CWM and EAP
The process for connecting CWM and EAP is currently largely manual. Each agile group/team in EAP must be individually configured to use CWM as its agile tool. While this automatically creates a board for the group, connected work items and board views must be set up one by one. Luckily, the sprints created for the group in EAP are automatically carried over to CWM. For a client with more than 20 agile groups, this meant repeating the same configuration steps multiple times. There is currently no bulk configuration option for boards or connected work items. - Connected Work Filtering Behavior
Connected Work is undoubtedly CWM’s strongest feature. It allows teams to define filters (field, operator, value) that dynamically pull in the relevant records. When new records match the filter conditions, they appear automatically on the board. However, when a filter condition is changed, the data records satisfying the previous condition are not automatically removed from the board. Only the new records (matching the new condition) are added to the board. The workaround is to remove the work item type (from the three vertical dots) entirely and then re-add it with the new condition.