ServiceNow offers a fantastic variety of features for ITBM, but sometimes a client wants a little extra functionality for certain areas of business. We think Meisterplan is a great solution to meet that need. In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of Meisterplan along with Rego’s ServiceNow-Meisterplan Integration. If you’d like more info, view the on-demand webinar featuring Grant Zemont and Stephan Anders, or check out our Meisterplan integration page for details.
What is It?
To put it simply, Meisterplan is a PPM tool designed to help you adopt a lean Agile approach to projects, resources, and portfolios. It excels at helping organizations compose and design the best possible portfolios—both strategically and from a resource perspective. The primary goal of Meisterplan is to tackle and resolve issues before they happen, so you can keep portfolios running smoothly and plan for future events that might interfere with scheduling.
Another way to think of this is in terms of what-if analyses and scenario creation. Say that one of your Project Managers has a team of developers working on a project, but half of the team is out on personal leave for a week or two. Suddenly your allocations have run amok. With Meisterplan, there’s no need to panic.
A sleek UI allows drag-and-drop what-if scenario creation, so you can see how project, resource, and financial metrics change as you move priorities around, and locate other resources who have availability to work on your projects in advance. It enables realistic portfolio plans and roadmaps that work no matter what tools or methods your project teams use.
Below, you’ll see what the Portfolio Designer view looks like. This is where all of your portfolios live.
Meisterplan as an integration sits directly on top of the ServiceNow platform, but you can also use it independently of ServiceNow. That means that no information will change for PMs, who can continue to work in ServiceNow like usual. In the image above, you can see that the project on top is the highest-ranking project in the portfolio.
Below the red bar in the left column called “cut-off line,” you’ll see all the projects that didn’t get approved and won’t be included in reporting. This view also shows resources by role, which gives detailed info about allocations and capacity. In our demo, you’ll see how dynamic this view is—adjusting data in real-time to show a variety of planning options.
As you can see above, clicking on a particular role will give a more in-depth look at capacity, allocation, and expenses. You’ll get a closer look at impact to resources and scheduling via an interactive graph, as well as impact to all other projects in a portfolio. Scenario management is one area where Meisterplan can add tremendous value.
Meisterplan also stores scenarios for comparison against each other, as shown in the image above. This is an incredibly useful feature. Plus, you can see specific segments of projects or groups managed by any PM in your organization.
Rego’s Integration for ServiceNow
ServiceNow users will appreciate how flexible and intuitive Meisterplan is. You might be surprised to hear that in addition to its resource and PPM capabilities, it’s good for financial allocations and funds. Meisterplan offers some light modeling capabilities when you want to turn investments on and off or move targeted dates. It’s great for tactical resource planning and will always find the most available people to schedule on the highest priority work.
Rego’s integration for ServiceNow allows you to preserve all of the data in your existing system of record and transfer that data to Meisterplan. The image below gives you an idea of how our integration works.
Because the entire process is completed by Rego, there’s no need to consult external resources or worry about data security. Rego safely stores and transfers all of the information from ServiceNow to Meisterplan so that you can get started more quickly without stress. Below, you’ll see all of the pieces we take from ServiceNow and map to Meisterplan.
You can add items above and beyond these essential pieces, but we start with base data at first to ensure that you have a solid foundation to build on. Everything you need is located within a handy ServiceNow i-frame. This can be collapsed for a larger view and offers import/export options in the upper-right corner. The image below gives a preview of the UI in ServiceNow.
You can import your plans of record and export portfolios as needed. When you go with Rego’s ServiceNow integration, we can transfer any custom items at your request.
After you’ve spent some time analyzing your what-if scenarios and found one you want to move forward with, you can either use a reporting engine in Meisterplan, print reports, or go into ServiceNow and make manual adjustments—or, you can export the info to ServiceNow, bring the scenario into Meisterplan, and preview changes.
Meisterplan allows you to view old and new values, export to Excel, and view resulting changes. The below image shows you a summary of those changes in Meisterplan.
You can export data from ServiceNow or change data based on Meisterplan revisions.
Rego is committed to keeping our integration updated for every ServiceNow release, so our information and services are constantly evolving. If you’d like to learn more about getting a customized and feature-rich integration for your ServiceNow platform, feel free to contact us. We’re happy to answer any questions you might have.
Follow this link for a free Meisterplan trial, so you can preview the functionality for yourself.
We’d like to thank Grant and Stephan for lending their expertise to our ServiceNow-Meisterplan integration webinar.
Grant Zemont is a PPM consultant and trainer for Rego Consulting. Over the past twenty-two years, his career has revolved around project and resource management as a practitioner, leader, and educator. His approach focuses on the people side of the equation, embracing conscious leadership principles.
Stephan Anders is a regional director for Meisterplan in North America. Since joining Meisterplan in 2014, he has been a returning participant and speaker at RegoU. Stephan lives with his wife and daughter in Toronto, home to the NBA Champions Toronto Raptors.
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