Complex enterprises scale their Agile practices using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to make use of numerous benefits like faster time to market, improved quality, stronger alignment, increased productivity, and reduced risk. But what many tend to underestimate is the amount of change that SAFe adoption requires within the organization itself. And here is where a lot of companies start to struggle. One of the main reasons for that is not having the right structure and tools in place.
ServiceNow has found a solution to alleviate this pain. Their Collaborative Work Management (CWM) is a unified cloud-based platform that supports teams in planning, visualizing, and executing their work in one single place. In addition, CWM allows team members to collaborate with each other, use shared workspaces, and jointly develop relevant documentation. This reduces time spent on repetitive and administrative activities in order to support teams in being more effective and efficient.
Work organization in CWM
Spaces
Work in CWM is segmented into distinct spaces. As a CWM user, you will have your own space within CWM, called ‘My Space’. It is visible only to you and allows you to organize work in the most convenient way for you.
Additionally, you will be able to create a custom space for a specific team, project or initiative. This space can be organized in various ways, depending on the needs. You can create boards and documents directly into the space, or you can organize them into folders for a better logical structure and cleaner digital workspace.
Once you have created your custom space, you are ready to share it with cross-team members, so you can work together on tasks and projects. Sharing a space with a team member grants them access to everything that is available on the space – folders, boards, and documents.
However, as the owner of the space, you can decide on the type of permissions you will grant to your space invitees – Editor, Viewer, or Owner. What is more, you will have visibility on the users who have requested access to the space, so you can decide whether to grant or deny their access request.
Boards
Boards are centralized visual workspaces that bring together various types of work items (e.g., stories, defects, incidents, etc.) and enable teams to collaborate, organize, and prioritize, while tracking their tasks in an efficient manner. There is no specific limit to the number of boards you can create within a single space in CWM. When deciding on how many boards you will need for your team, you need to keep in mind the limitations of CWM. For instance, you cannot have more than 90 custom columns shared across boards in a single space. Furthermore, boards synchronize automatically and display only the 1,000 most recent items.
Each board that you create within CWM will allow you to visualize data using List, Gantt, Kanban, or Sprint Planning views. You can customize the type of views that would be displayed on your board, and you can choose the most appropriate view, based on the type of activity you will be performing, or the data that you wish to be exposed to. Each board provides clear visibility on how work within it is interconnected to avoid switching context to track dependencies or bottlenecks.
Each CWM view has its own personalization window, so you can organize the displayed data in the most suitable way for you and your team. Once you have personalized the view, CWM allows you to save it – either as part of your team’s view on the board, or for your own use. What comes in really handy is that you can add columns based on already existing in your work item fields, or you can create your own custom column.
Custom columns can be of various types, among which are short/long text, number, date, label, people, reference, etc. The newest release (Australia) even allows you to create a formula column with calculations based on your tasks, like getting metrics from existing fields, calculating date differences, or summing up hours.
Often, you will find yourself in need of analyzing the data on your CWM board or sharing it with stakeholders who lack access to your team’s CWM space. In that case, you are able to export your current or complete board view into Excel or CSV.
Board Views
We already mentioned that CWM boards provide you with the following views: List, Gantt, Kanban and Sprint Planning. Each of them can present up to 1,000 of your team’s most recent work items. But how can they help you visualize your team’s work?
- The List View displays work items in a structured grid, each work item represents a row and each column represents a specific detail about the work item (e.g. status, start date, end date, priority, etc.). The List View allows you to review tasks quickly, inline edit fields, use filters and sorting to manage large workloads.
- The Gantt View is ideal for scheduling, planning, tracking progress or dependencies. It presents work items on a horizontal calendar timeline as bars where the position of the bar indicates the start and end date of the work item. The Gantt View is split into two sections – the one on the left presents the work items and the one on the right the calendar itself.
- The Kanban View is your go-to view what you want to get a clear, up-to-date overview of how your team is progressing with their work. It is ideal in cases where you want to enhance your team’s collaboration. CWM’s Kanban View is a board that helps you organize your team’s work items using 50 configurable rows and columns. Your team can easily move work items between rows and columns by using the drag-and-drop functionality. With the latest release comes quick filters that can be applied directly to the Kanban board. The filters can be applied to saved views and CWM board templates. This helps you easily find the work that matters the most to you.
- If you are part of an Agile team and you want to plan, organize and track the work of your team, you would become fond of the Sprint Planning View. The Backlog section of this view makes it easy for you to prioritize your team’s backlog, whereas the Sprints section gives you the opportunity to create sprints, plan work items within them and execute them together with your team. The Sprint section displays only your active sprints. There you can directly add work items and get live information about the utilized capacity, total number of stories and story points, and remaining story points to be completed within the sprint.
Work items in CWM boards
- Create work items
Each view of your CWM board allows you to directly create work items inside it. You can choose from the default (agile work item types), or you can create your own custom work item types. This can help you and your team differentiate much more easily the type of activities that need to be performed.
One limitation that the Australia release has resolved (which was not available with previous releases) is related to being able to break user stories into Scrum tasks. This makes user stories easier to estimate and track.
- Connect work
One of the strongest flexes of CWM is that it allows you to connect different types of work items from various ServiceNow applications into one single board. CWM’s Connected Work allows you to add up to 10 different work item types (tables) on your board. You can set up multiple conditions to ensure that only the most relevant work items for your team are displayed on your CWM board. A key limitation that you need to keep in mind if you are part of a very busy and/or complex team, is that your filter should not return more than 100 items when you set up your connected work item. In case you cannot fit into this condition, you will need to contact your administrator to increase the number to up to 500.
Managing your own work in CWM
If you have ever been part of a complex team that handles various types of tasks in one or many systems, you know how important it is to efficiently track all your to-dos to ensure they are done in accordance with their due dates or SLAs. CWM’s My Work has got you covered. It offers a centralized view for all work items assigned to you for a specific time frame, grouped by state or priority. In addition, it presents the amount of open, completed and overdue work items and summarizes your overall progress. This makes it easy for you to plan and prioritize your own work.
CWM Automations
Automations are available for you out of the box with CWM. Use them to boost your team’s productivity by automating manual routine tasks like emails, scheduling, and task delegation tailored to your workflow. You can choose from several different automation templates. All you need to do is set up the conditions that need to be met, and CWM will apply the automations to all work items on your board.
Below you can find some examples of tasks that you can automate via CWM Automations:
- Send an e-mail or a notification when a given field is changed.
- Send an e-mail or a notification when a given date has arrived.
- Change a given field if another field is changed or if a certain date is changed.
AI for CWM
In today’s modern business world, everyone is talking about AI. ServiceNow’s Now Assist for CWM uses its generative AI experience to support teams in improving their productivity and efficiency. You can use it to produce, summarize, or improve your content in the CWM Docs, create work items based on the content of your Docs, generate acceptance criteria or scrum tasks for user stories, etc.
ServiceNow’s Collaborative Work Management plays a crucial role in connecting agile teams’ everyday work with a company’s high-level strategy. This AI-powered platform brings together various pieces of work to improve the collaboration between agile team members, enables them to perform their everyday tasks in an efficient manner and boosts their productivity.