Swift innovation, seamless software delivery, and rapid customer value are the trifecta of goals every business aspires to achieve for sustained excellence in this uber-competitive landscape. Every business aims to accomplish these goals by continuously improving strategic alignment, resource allocation, planning, risk management, visibility, and flexibility.
Too Many Tools: Losing Forest for Trees
PPM (Project Portfolio Management), Agile methodologies, and DevOps practices have helped businesses significantly enhance visibility, strategic alignment, code shipping, resource use, and collaboration.
They are fantastic at handling extensive portfolios and programs and ensuring everything aligns strategically. Agile methods, too, have accelerated code delivery and enabled constant improvement.
But here is the catch: they each have their specialties.
PPM might need to catch up on the details of individual projects, while Agile can sometimes lose sight of the big picture and the strategic goals behind those quick development cycles. Also, data often stays stuck in each tool’s own space. So, we might need to catch up on how a new feature makes customers happy or how smoothly resources move between various parts of the company.
Amidst all these limitations, a key piece has still gone missing: understanding how value goes from an idea to reaching the customer.
All these tools show only part of the picture. With only these individual tools, we might lose sight of forests for trees – which is neither optimal nor sustainable.
This is where Value Stream Management tools come in.
Like a music conductor harmonizing the enterprise's individual strengths, a VSM tool harnesses the power of particular features to streamline and optimize the value flow across the enterprise.
A VSM platform visualizes the entire journey of an idea to the end customer, highlighting each step and revealing where value is created or lost. Casting a transparent pipeline like these value streams helps identify bottlenecks, optimize the flow, and deliver fast and more impactful value.
Today, only two VSM (Value Stream Management) tools stand out, providing businesses with ultimate strategic alignment and enhanced visibility into delivering services more rapidly and at higher quality: Broadcom’s ValueOps and ServiceNow’s SPM.
Broadcom ValueOps vs. ServiceNow SPM – The Ultimate Showdown:
Broadcom’s ValueOps leads the industry, earning top positions in major analyst reports such as Gartner MQ for PPM, Gartner MQ for Enterprise Agile Tools, Forrester Wave for Strategic Portfolio Management, and IDC Agile PPM Marketscape.
ServiceNow also holds leadership positions in Gartner and Forrester reports covering SPM, Agile tools, and VSM.
So, which tool is better? Let's pit them against each other in an objective, full-flow fight, dissecting their strengths, weaknesses, and suitability for organizations. By the end of this blog, you will have a clear idea about the right VSM choice for your organization. Read on!
Content – Inside:
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Round 1: ValueOps vs SPM – Capabilities
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Round 2: ValueOps vs SPM – Strengths
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Round 3: ValueOps vs SPM – The Weaknesses
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ValueOps vs SPM – The Result
Round 1: ValueOps vs SPM – Capabilities:
ValueOps is the most complete VSM platform available in the industry today. Powered by the most extensive set of VSM features available, ValueOps leaves no stone unturned in offering the most potent and comprehensive Value Stream Management platform possible.
ServiceNow also packages a comprehensive list of capabilities, but a few are only available for the pro version. Some critical capabilities, such as Agile development, Test Management, Investment Planning, Innovation Management, and a Financial Modelling engine, are limited to SPM Pro users.
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Having said that, SPM also misses a few features, even in their Pro versions. Want to know what SPM misses out on? Here is a comprehensive showdown of capabilities between ValueOps and ServiceNow SPM for comparison:
With the ‘U’ release, SPM is nearing ValueOps in PPM capabilities. Although ServiceNow SPM Pro lags Value Ops in seven categories, Value Ops fully meets the requirements in all categories.
So, in all fairness:
Round Winner – ValueOps
Scorecard end of Round 1: ValueOps -1 and SPM -0
Round 2: ValueOps vs SPM – Strengths
Given that SPM trailed in the last round, let us give it the first shot at showcasing its strengths.
The Good Parts: Strengths of ServiceNow SPM
- Integrated Workflow:
ServiceNow’s SPM offers automated workflows extending throughout the platform. You can trigger a project idea in SPM, automatically initiate resource allocation, track its progress from development to deployment in ITSM and ITOM, and even measure its impact on business goals seamlessly.
No manual handoffs or data do-overs are needed; the automated workflow in SPM makes everything seamless and accurate.
- New Business Goal Framework:
The updated goal framework in ServiceNow SPM supports alignment with goals, value streams, and portfolio strategy. This feature enables the planning and alignment of work items, projects, and portfolios with the overall strategy, accommodating multiple categories of goals that were impossible earlier.
- Planning Support:
SPM has upgraded its planning capabilities. It now supports forecasting for projects, portfolios, investments, and resources that align with specific business goals and outcomes.
This upgrade boosts precision and strategic alignment in planning and sets the projects and investments on a path to success from the get-go!
- DevOps Solution Integration:
SPM teams up with multiple Dev toolsets to integrate, collect data, and present a whole picture. Lending a comprehensive view enables you to easily track progress, gain insights, and identify areas for improvement.
- Portfolio Management:
ServiceNow’s SPM lets you group projects and programs into portfolios, like organizing playlists. It makes handling complex initiatives a breeze and helps you keep track of their progress without effort.
Additionally, SPM lets users link risks and issues to portfolios, which is quite nifty for gaining insights into potential challenges and their impact.
The Good Parts: Strengths of ValueOps from Broadcom
ValueOps provides business goal frameworks, top-notch planning support, data integration, and industry-best portfolio management. ValueOps easily matches all the strengths of SPM with its comprehensive offerings. However, there are a few differentiator areas where ValueOps trumps SPM with its unique selling points (USPs). Here are a few:
- Perfectly Optimized for Digital Transformation:
ValueOps is your go-to Value Stream Management (VSM) platform for digital transformation. Unlike SPM, which solely focuses on IT projects, ValueOps provides insights into the value delivered across everything funded.
It brings unprecedented transparency, aligns work with strategy, and enables mapping the value stream to the epic level—a feature evidently lacking in SPM. It also highlights value at every level, making digital transformation seamless and efficient.
- Full Support for Digital Product Development:
With support for release management, release tracking, and iteration planning—capabilities that are weak with SPM—ValueOps provides robust and full-fledged support for digital product development.
- Resource Management for Complex Projects:
ValueOps gives users an unprecedented ability to resource complex projects that are wired with multiple dependencies, varying resource capabilities, and billing rates – a feature SPM sorely lacks.
- Financial Management:
Unlike SPM, which offers little beyond basic financial prowess, ValueOps provides robust financial support. It includes support for financial classes, locations, departments, cost codes, and rate matrix, as well as incident financials, WIP adjustments, and process chargebacks.
- Dynamic Architecture:
ServiceNow’s SPM, with its single-tenant architecture, can be a pain in the back with compatibility issues, downtime, and operation hiccups. Fortunately, ValueOps’ dynamic architecture prevents all the problems faced by single-tenant architecture and puts you on a road to seamless upgrades and top-notch performance.
ValueOps matches all of SPM’s strengths and boasts five differentiator areas where SPM lacks ground, making this round another easy win for ValueOps.
So, in all fairness, again:
Round Winner – ValueOps
Scorecard end of Round 2: ValueOps- 2 and SPM- 0
Round 3: ValueOps vs SPM – The Weaknesses
All right, since SPM has found itself trailing once again, let us give it one final chance to take a swing at its weaknesses. Let the showdown continue!
Not So Good Parts: The Weaknesses of ServiceNow SPM
- Does not Support Seamless Updates:
The single-tenant architecture of ServiceNow hinders seamless upgrades. This type of architecture also increases downtime, which can cause potential hiccups in operations every time the need for an upgrade arises.
- Customizations Can Trigger Complications:
Customizations made for previous versions may no longer be compatible with new releases and require reimplementation. The complication may hamper the smooth transitions to newer versions and prevent straightforward upgrades.
- Needs More Resources:
ServiceNow requires a dedicated ServiceNow admin and a ServiceNow developer for ongoing management. This adds to the increased overhead and may lead to other problems, such as potential skill gaps, slower problem resolutions, or feature implementation.
- Limited Hierarchy Flexibility:
The SPM’s built-in organizational hierarchy may not align with complex organizational structures. This lack of alignment leads to misaligned IT processes, user inefficiency, and confusion.
- Weaker VSM Market Penetration:
SPM's VSM market penetration is relatively low (40 clients worldwide), translating to less community support and potentially fewer best practices and insights available.
- Limited Iteration and Release Management:
ServiceNow’s release and upgrade cycles usually do not align with agile development practices, leading to slower innovation and growing integration difficulties.
- Backward Compatibility Issues:
New features and functionality in ServiceNow’s latest releases tend to be incompatible with older versions, forcing upgrades if those features/functionality are required.
Because 60% of ServiceNow users are not on the current release, this may complicate their upgrade planning, forcing early upgrades before the desired functionality is mature.
Not So Good Parts: The Weaknesses of ValueOps
A few purported weaknesses are circulating about Broadcom ValueOps, and we are putting them right on the table. We also share our clear-cut responses to give the audience a full picture and enable them to make their own informed decision. Let us dive in!
- Broadcom does not support a single platform to record strategy & create disparate data between critical IT, business, and operational systems, DevOps, SecOps, and GRC.
Our response: Broadcom delivers a best-in-class solution, offering ultimate visibility and alignment for modern work across teams and the entire enterprise. In contrast, few service providers offer a single platform, which is usually fraught with downtime issues and customization challenges that lead to painful upgrade experiences for users.
In practice, customers are increasingly inclined towards solutions that can seamlessly create visibility, alignment, and effective management of work across their entire organization. Our leadership position and market penetration are a testament to the effectiveness of this approach.
- Broadcom falls short in leveraging AI capabilities compared to ServiceNow, which has actively invested in this technology through various acquisitions.
Our response: The AI acquisitions in question do not directly enhance the PPM, DevOps, or Agile development aspects of the SPM and lack any noticeable impact on efficiency. ServiceNow’s SPM and ValueOps are evenly poised regarding AI power through acquisitions.
- Broadcom cannot bring in data from your existing Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) toolchain.
Our response: Broadcom’s ValueOps solution provides one of the best integration platforms on the market with ConnectAll. ConnectAll can be used to connect popular applications seamlessly for source code management, app security, CI/CD test management, and much more. ValueOps provides endless integration capabilities with its universal adaptor option.
- Broadcom lacks predictive and AI-based insights.
Our response: ServiceNow’s performance analytics, which produce predictive insights, are unavailable on the out-of-the-box (OOTB) platform. It demands data scientists prepare and create data tables and write ML scripts to analyze the insights.
The gaps do exist even with the most perfect software on the planet. But are they relevant and consequential to users? That said, in comparison, the weaknesses of SPM completely overshadow the purported gaps, giving ValueOps another easy win.
So, in all fairness, again:
Round Winner – ValueOps
Scorecard at the end of Round 3: ValueOps -3 and SPM -0
Ultimate Winner of the Showdown: ValueOps from Broadcom
By bringing together Clarity™, Rally®, ValueOps ConnectALL®, and ValueOps Insights in one platform, ValueOps has assembled the most powerful and comprehensive solution for enterprises. With industry-leading capabilities across each product, we believe the overall value provided by the segment or complete platform is unmatched in the current industry. If you'd like to learn more or discuss your specific needs, please contact us for a consultation.
Note: The above information is solely provided for educational purposes. While this is our take on two of the best Value Stream Management tools in the business, we urge you to do additional research on information that is specific to your use case.