Microsoft Project Online End-of-Life: Your Path Forward with ServiceNow SPM

Jeff Butler

Well, welcome. Thank you all very much for joining the joint webinar between Ondaro and ServiceNow on the topic of the Microsoft Project Online end of life, which is happening, as we’ll be talking about, a little bit later this year. And we’re going to be talking today—obviously, as a group—about how ServiceNow SPM should be, we believe, on your short list of considerations to replace Microsoft Project Online as an option, but we’re going to be going into a lot more detail on that today.

First of all, welcome to everyone who’s joined us. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Jeff Butler. I’m the general manager here at Ondaro Canada. And although we, I believe, have folks with us from across North America joining the call. So thank you very much. And some of my colleagues on the line from both ServiceNow and Ondaro across North America are also on the line today.

So let’s go ahead and get started here. You can see our agenda. We’re going to be starting with an intro and then talking about the opportunity here in front of us around the sunset of the Project Online platform and then talking about how ServiceNow SPM—going through an overview of that—how that could be, as we discussed, a potential solution, a place to put some of those workflows. And then we’ll be doing a short demonstration by our friend Claudia Lee, who’s going to be doing that. And then we’ll wrap up with a Q&A at the end of that.

So we’ve got a great group of folks. I see we’ve got 46 folks on the line here with us today. And happy to have that as well as other people who’ll be watching this recording after the show.

Just a few items. Just imagine most of you have spent a lot of time on Teams and/or Zoom or others, but you have an option, as you can see on the camera, a few places where you can unmute yourself. So we’re doing it. We really want to encourage a dialogue here today. I’ve already introduced myself, and so why don’t I pass it over just quickly to Kevin O’Brien, and then we’ll pass it over to our friends from ServiceNow.

Kevin O’Brien

Hi, all. Kevin O’Brien. I am the director of our SPM and Enterprise architecture practices at Ondaro. I also happen to wear a dual hat. I am the private sector portfolio director as well. So I have responsibility for our private sector PMO in addition to our SPM work, and so happy to talk with you guys today.

Claudia Lee

Good afternoon, everyone. Claudia Lee. I’m a solution consultant at ServiceNow. I’ve been working in the ServiceNow ecosystem for about six or seven years now and actually started off as a project practitioner before I joined ServiceNow.

Jeff Butler

Over to you, David.

David McPherson

David McPherson, senior solutions sales executive. I’ve been with ServiceNow—actually, in six days’ time, it will be a full year. Prior to ServiceNow, I was head of strategy and go-to-market for a large organization and also led large global teams. So strategic portfolio management is actually an area where I have a lot of affinity and a lot of pain that the solution addresses. So I’ll be coming up today.

Jeff Butler

Thank you very much, David. Just a quick word: This is not supposed to be a massive ad for Ondaro, but, really, a quick word about who we are: We are a ServiceNow pure-play—or sometimes called boutique ServiceNow partner. This is what we do, and we get up and think about it every day. We have fully certified resources across the whole platform, and you can see a couple of the other areas that—we’re obviously focusing in on SPM today—but have a lot of certified resources across the Americas and Canada, the US, Brazil, and Mexico, and obviously would be open to a conversation after this call today, if you’re interested in hearing more about our organization.

First of all—and we’d love you to, again, we’re trying to make this as interactive as possible, even though we have over 50 folks on the line with us here today. I imagine the answer is going to be quite strong. But how many of you—if you could just put in there yes or no—how many of you are using Microsoft Project Online platform today? Some of you might just be on here because you’re interested in learning more about Servicenow’s SPM. But if you can put that in the chat, that would be great.

So mostly, yes, absolutely. And we do note that Microsoft Project Online was a popular product. And I will say you’re definitely in the right place here, if you’re looking at considering other options, to see where you’re going to go from here. So thank you very much. Glad to have you all here with us today.

Kevin, I guess I’ll pass this one over to you.

Kevin O’Brien

I’ll take it from here. Thanks, Jeff.

So, what is the call to action? What we’re here today to really talk about is the Microsoft Project Online end of life. You can see here in the slide there’s a little bit of a timeline visual. October 1st, 2025, Microsoft announced that new sales of Project Online are going to stop, and by September 30th, 2026, the product is going to be decommissioned. And so there is basically a 12-month timeline that clients have been given to find an alternative technology. And if they don’t, there’s the potential for data loss, or there will be data loss, because the product is going away.

So what we thought would be helpful for folks who are in the situation of having to maybe move off Microsoft Project Online is give you some of our experience on what we see is the typical timelines for contracting lifecycles. It can run anywhere from two to six months, and sometimes our implementations of SPM can run anywhere from eight to 16 weeks, depending on how complex they are.

And so when you start to look at those overall timelines, and you back away, when do we need to begin a journey to get off of Project Online? We land on March 2026 is really the latest you can start. If you have a complex implementation of Project, you really got to start now. But what we’re finding is that, really, by March 1st, you really need to be getting down the path of finding your next technology and then looking at the licensing and the implementation and everything and putting together your plan so that you don’t have data loss scenarios. Ideally, you get something in place ahead of March or September 30th, 2026. You don’t have operational disruption. And the longer you wait, the more compressed your timeline is going to be. And we find that compressed timelines are usually leading to inoptimal decisions. So we just thought it would be helpful for folks to think through what the timeline impacts might be in their organization.

Jeff Butler

Currently, as Ondaro, I think we have about three of these engagements ongoing at the moment, if I’m not mistaken, across North America. So as you said, I know there’s other folks who’ve started this journey a little bit earlier, but we’re not basically saying it’s too late now. But I think the goal of this, obviously, is just, knowing that this is coming—and as you say, that eight to 16 weeks is quite a bit of flex in there, but it’s certainly worth the conversation sooner rather than later.

Kevin O’Brien

So yeah, I could take this one too. So the one thing is, as you’re looking at what is next for us, I think one of the things that we thought would be helpful to share with the groups on this call is what are the things that we’re hearing from PMO leaders? And what should PMO leaders be looking for and in terms of the capabilities and the needs as you’re replacing Project Online with something next?

And so a lot of PMOs are looking for portfolio rollup and visibility into the overall portfolio and the ability to slice it in different ways. We find that often happens manually in a lot of cases today. And so these are things like portfolio rollup and visibility is something we believe should be important as you’re picking your next technology.

Resource management depth. A lot of organizations that we’ve talked to don’t have very sophisticated resource management capabilities. And I think it’s something most organizations are looking for. And so it should be a factor as you’re deciding your next technology as you’re putting together your plans.

The ability to facilitate enterprise governance and compliance processes. Again, this is another area where we found a lot of things happen manually with many organizations we’ve worked with. And the ability to facilitate that in a more systematic way is something we think should be part of your selection criteria.

The ability to integrate in with other workflows. So, how well does the technology integrate into other parts of IT if you’re an ITPMO, like ITSM and ITOM and ITAM and other things that are native to typical IT departments.



And then how well does the capability set scale as your complexity of your PMO grows? So, as you want to get more mature on your PMO processes, can the technology scale natively with your organization? If it can, that’s something that might be worth looking at as you’re picking your next solution.



Kinda talked about this a little bit in the previous slide, but what decision criteria for PMO leaders as they’re picking their next solution? Like I said, portfolio visibility, we believe, should be a strong criteria. Enterprise governance, obviously, is something that all organizations, I think, we advise to have some level of governance or multiple levels of governance processes in place. And so the ability to facilitate that natively in the technology.

Having flexibility from a methodology perspective. Does the technology enable you to do waterfall, agile, and hybrid approaches? Almost every one of the PMOs I’ve worked with at Ondaro has some form of agile, hybrid, and waterfall, and so how well does the technology set support that blend of methodologies?

How well is resource management baked into the technology capability, I think, is a factor that should be in the decision criteria.

And then integration points. Oftentimes, when you’re building systems in maybe legacy IT worlds, you have to connect those systems to other systems. Well, if there’s technology out there that has native connection points, that can actually save you time. And so it’s something that we think should be part of your decision criteria.

And like I said previously, scalability. So as you get more mature, and as a PMO, as you start to connect your strategic plans to all of your execution, does the capability set natively allow you to see those connection points and then mature how your portfolio management is operating?

And so really the questions that PMO leaders should be asking themselves, number 1, based on the timelines we were just talking about, how are we planning to address the Project Online retirement deadline? If you don’t have something in place today, like Jeff was saying, we have a few clients that have begun this process in the fall of last year. But if you haven’t, you really need to be starting that process by March.

What visibility do you have into your resource capacity? So do you have that ability to do the resource loading and the resource leveling across your portfolio? Is that something that you’re doing manually?

Do you have connection points into your strategic objectives? If not, does the technology enable you to really fully build the strategic plan all the way through to every level of execution across the organization?

And then how much time does your PMO spend consolidating this data from multiple systems? If you don’t have the strategic capabilities that I was just talking about, you are going to be spending a lot of time putting that data together. Most of the organizations we’ve talked to and we’ve worked with have come from various tool sets, and so normalizing the data all across all of those tools takes a significant amount of time. And so those are factors I think you need to be looking at.

Jeff Butler



Just along the lines of what you’re saying based on the conversations I’ve had with some of the clients we’ve been working with here in Canada is it really should be an opportunity—and hopefully most big tool changes like this are. It’s not just replacing tool A with tool B. It’s saying, “OK, that’s how I was running my life when it was Microsoft Project Online. But how might I, based on the functionality that I’m gonna see out of my new tool (hopefully ServiceNow SPM), how might I run my business differently? How could I have even more visibility, more consolidation, more ability to look across my organization than I did with what I was using before?”

Kevin O’Brien

Yes, that’s exactly right. What we thought would be helpful to present to this group is what are some of the paths that Microsoft’s providing as alternatives to Project Online.

So one path that is available—actually, both of these paths are available today—but Microsoft Planner Premium is something that is available now as a product, and it does give you a lot of the project work breakdown, structure capabilities, task-tracking capabilities that some folks are using Microsoft Project Online for. It’s important, though, to look at what are the gaps. So if you’re looking at Planner Premium as an alternative to Project Online, some of the things we were just talking about around the enterprise-level resource planning and capacity management aren’t natively built in. And so it’s something you need to consider as you’re putting together your selection criteria. Financial management capabilities is something that is native to SPM, but it is something a lot of PMOs are aspiring to get to that holistic budgetary and ROI tracking view. Do you have the ability to do that? If that’s something you don’t do today, are you looking to mature to that capability? It’s not available in Planner Premium, and so we think it’s important to point out.

Basic portfolio views. How many views can you get for your portfolios and being able to layer on to the strategic alignment all the way down to the different levels of execution, including programs and projects. The basic capabilities in Planner Premium don’t necessarily give you that full view that I was talking about a lot of PMO leaders are looking for.

And then how well is it natively integrated into the rest of your IT organization. There aren’t really any integration points into ITSM and ITOM natively. Not to say that it’s not a bad product; it’s just something that you should consider as you’re looking for what is your selection.

Project Server is also a product that’s been around for a long time. It is something that does require an infrastructure burden. Many of our customers are going cloud first. But if you decided to stand up a server and go the route of Microsoft Project Server, you would be probably with some group of folks out there who are still using that technology set. It’s a little bit on the legacy side, so to speak, and so it doesn’t have native AI capabilities built into it that a lot of products are moving towards these days. The security and compatibility updates are limited. I think the innovation on Project Server is not quite as where Microsoft has been going, and so it’s also a little bit siloed from the other parts of the IT enterprise.

And so these are some options that you have as you’re trying to pick what you want to move to next. But I’m hoping that you can see that they may not have everything that some PMOs are often looking for. So it’s important to consider that. And that becomes the strategic gap. Neither Microsoft option really connects the project execution to the broader enterprise, to the rest of the IT organization and digital transformation initiatives. And so there is a significant opportunity, when you set your course to modernize your technology stack amongst the PMO, to really establish a modernization objective and really build your technology footprint based upon what your real needs are.

Jeff Butler

OK. All right. So we’ve got one more poll before we move over to David and the ServiceNow team, who I think are going to be taking it from here. But we’re just curious, again, just a poll. And Kristen, maybe you could read off some of the answers. But we’re just wondering, again, what other platforms that the folks on the call might be considering as you look as another option to replace Microsoft Project Online?

Jeff Butler

That’s good to hear.

David McPherson

Fantastic.

David McPherson

Right, in which case, let me take over, and I’ll give you a little bit more information. So, so far we’ve talked about Microsoft, what’s obviously happening with the solutions, and then the options that Microsoft are offering. So what I’d like to do is provide another option for you.

So when we're really thinking about portfolio planning—or PPM, as it’s commonly referred to—it’s actually part of a longer end-to-end process. And in the last 12 months, I’ve talked to a lot of different customers about this particular process. And ultimately, what they’re trying to achieve is to define a strategy and then with that strategy deliver customer value.

Really, I’m looking at it in terms of scale and pace, being able to encompass that. The typical steps are create the goals and the OKRs and create that strategic road map, the planning associated with that. Quite often, if it’s a technology transformation, bringing in the enterprise architects in order to find that future state. Then all of that is prioritized now in terms of aligning the strategy to work, but also taking input from the rest of the organization through some sort of demand channel. Then you get the portfolio and project management teams involved in order to take that prioritized work and actually manage the delivery of that out to the end customer. And the end customer could be somebody internally or teams internally, but it also could be end customers externally as well.

So this is the common flow, and I think it’s pretty standard. Everybody should recognize this. And really, the concept behind SPM is to really provide the capabilities that simplifies this end-to-end flow. Because what happens is whenever I talk to a lot of the different customers that I’ve presented to you over the last 12 months, then I’m finding that the underlying technologies, there’s a bit of everything. Quite often, they’re using PowerPoint. They’re using Project tools. Monday.com I think was mentioned in the chat. Excel spreadsheets. SharePoint a lot. But ultimately, each of the teams are using individual solutions. And that brings in siloed tools, disconnected processes, loads of manual handovers or hand-offs, continually chasing for status updates and where we are, and trying to use some sort of centralized tools in order to pull this all back together again. And really where we see is SPM or strategic portfolio management is a simplification of this.

Now, we’re not saying that we’ve replaced everything, because some of these solutions will still have a strategic need, but really about using the SPM as simplifying that end-to-end flow. And I said earlier about pace—and I’ll talk a little bit about AI as we go through the presentation and then into the demo—the pace is increasing. And really, by having these disconnected solutions in place, you’re restricting your ability to be able to deliver the value realization that the strategies are originally defined to deliver against. So that’s really the higher-level problem statement.

So let me go down another level to talk about what do we provide within SPM. And the starting point is really on the ServiceNow platform. I will talk about it. And Kevin actually alluded to it as well: a single platform, a single data model, for all of our solutions or workflows, which sit on top of it, SPM being one of those. So this solution—so the platform itself will have basically all the security requirements, permissions, etc., and reporting built into it, AI built into it. And we’ll talk about that. But really, we’ve got a common location with CMDB and common data models and everything that sit there. But what that allows us to do is have a very consistent feel across all of our solutions. And so that’s the foundational step which allows us to deliver or to help us to define that strategy and then deliver the value to either your employees or external customers. Think of it as step one.

Then, within SPM, we have the ability to define the goals and the OKRs. And last year, I actually talked to a lot of hospitals. And hospitals are fantastically busy, have a lot of different projects happening at any point in time. But when I asked them, “Well, can you relate the projects that you’re working to back to the strategy and the goals for the organization?” none of them could. None of them really had an answer for that. So they were busy doing work, but trying to understand the value of that work was extremely difficult.

So within SBM, we start on the strategic planning side and really help you to define those goals, define the OKRs, and then pull them together in terms of a strategic road map. We also are able to pull in information from—if it’s a technology transformation—from the enterprise architects. So looking at what is that future state that they’re building off? They’re taking the current state, defining that future technology state, looking at the required capabilities, and aligning that into the overall strategy for the organization as a whole.

And then we get into the continuous planning. I also spend time working with federal governments and departments within the government. And this year or last year, there’s been a lot of change. So budgets changing, resources changing, being able to prioritize the projects that they have. And in the previous slide, with those disjointed processes, it’s extremely difficult to really try to define what’s important and then execute against this. So this is why we were now looking at a continuous road map of planning. It’s continually changing, looking at the needs of the organization. And whether that’s from a product viewpoint—so product portfolios or value streams across all of our capabilities—or the business services that you’re creating that are underpinned by the technology, all of these are part of that planning process. And we have a lens into each of these areas so that we can create the right plan against the strategy and the resources of the organization as a whole. So that’s on the top line.

At the same time, as you’re building this road map, you’re able to pull—if you have the other solutions on the same platform, you’re able to pull information from across the organization in to be able to support that road map. So looking at, as an example, ideas, demands from a single intake, pulling in orders, etc., through that approach, looking at customer feedback on the products, but being able to pull all of this information together so that you are creating the right plan based on that overall strategy. So you’re also able to pull in from other technology domains, such as operations and service and security, information that you need to react to that has to be part of those overall plans.

And then we get into the delivery, where the project managers and product managers sit within the organization. And this is taking that output from the planning process the planners have defined what success looks like and then aligning that into the programs, the portfolios, the projects that are needed to deliver against that planning. And we also have the ability to also connect into the DevOps processes. Kevin also mentioned it in terms of agile or safe for waterfall or hybrid. We have the ability to not only drive that, but also, if you’ve got existing solutions, a place to be able to collect information from those and pull those back into the overall flow.

So what you’re seeing here now is the ability for my strategy through the strategic planning, road map planning, then into delivery. You’re able to see a full end-to-end view. So the leaderships of the organization are able to see in real time what is happening across their organization against the imperatives that they’ve actually defined and rolled out. So this is significant because we’ve now taken away a lot of the different challenges that we’re seeing with many organizations whenever they’re looking at point solutions for each of these different steps.

If you think about that up to that point is in terms of the creation of the applications or the updates to the applications, or the creation of a new business service, etc., that gets planned, tested, developed, tested, rolled out. But once it’s rolled out, what we also are able to do is actually start collecting that from either employees or customers back into the platform to understand the success of what’s actually being done, which is a key area which, again, a lot of organizations find it difficult to be able to measure. So it’s being able to pull that information. The update—that step in the transformation—has been created and delivered. But is it delivering the success that was originally defined at the start? Pull that information back from the production side of the fence in order to understand has it delivered against the value that was defined before. And that’s really the last step is actually pulling that back, understanding what the outcome was of that piece of work and even to process mine that back in to be able to support future strategies and development.

So this continuous process of improvement is really where a lot of organizations that are now starting to—you are moving up the maturity curve—but are now starting to get to because they can’t look at projects from a year-to-year basis. They need to continually evolve based on the market dynamics and the strategies that the organisations are putting in place to map to those.

So hopefully that gives you a sense of that end-to-end flow. And really, as I said in the previous slide, when we talk about strategic portfolio management, it’s about simplifying all of these steps to keep the organization in alignment.

So why ServiceNow? And I’ve talked a little bit about that single platform for all work. From a “Can we replace Project Online?” Yes, of course, but at a single level. But what we have also the ability to do is bring different information from across the organization into that single view so that, irrespective of where you are along that end-to-end flow, you have visibility into the current status of what you’re personally working on, but also, depending on permissions, etc., what other parts of the organization are working on as well. So that’s single platform, single view into what the organization is doing and ultimately what the capacity of the organization is to do more.

Strategic end to end. It’s basically the last slide. Now, from that OKR framework, the planning through to the delivery and the realisation of the outcomes. They may not actually be positive, and quite often as not, the strategy will—if it’s a good strategy, obviously, there’s a positive outcome. Sometimes strategies don’t deliver against their original goals. But it’s important to capture that so that you understand and learn from it as you grow as an organization.

Enterprise integration. That’s, as said already, being able to connect to service management or operations management or HR to see whether that transformation is actually having the positive effect.

And then the last part, the native AI with Now Assist, I said it in the previous slide, is that we’ve built AI into the platform, not as an add-on to the site. That’s not how we do it. But by doing it that way, it means that all of the solutions that sit on that platform, all of the solutions across ServiceNow, benefit from the AI capabilities. And what we’re seeing is an acceleration of not just the AI within the solution itself, but the ability of the solution to support the adoption of AI within organizations. So SPM is—if you think about it from a strategy, from a planning and execution, SPM is the solution that you will use in order to be able to plan, develop, adopt AI within your organizations back to that overall strategic need.

And then it’s a quick comparison just between the key capabilities within SPM, obviously, Planner, and Server SE. This is ultimately just to give you a sense of where our customers see ourselves as being strong in the key areas. But it’s not just, obviously, from the customer viewpoint, but Forrester’s recognized that SPM is one of the fastest-growing solutions within ServiceNow. But it’s also getting a lot of development and a lot of—it’s moving fast as a solution in its own right in order to be able to meet the needs in the market but also surpass them as we move into more and more of that end-to-end flow.

So why transition to ServiceNow? It’s, again, a unified platform. So eliminating that tool fatigue. It’s not about—Claudia says to me quite often, “Work smarter, not harder.” But I think we have to do both. I mean, when I’m meeting people that are in project management offices, and they might have effort that they’re having to do in order to get the work done, it’s phenomenal. But even though they translate that back into—but is it the right work? Is it the work that’s actually moving the organization forward? So having transparency around that is key.

Kevin talked about flexible project methodology support. We connect into the agile processes. We’ve traditional waterfall safe implementations, etc. And the key part is with the existing solutions in place, yes, we can pull that information from those and give you live updates, but also we can drive them as well if you don’t have those solutions in place just now. So we can help to drive that out.

Demand and delivery traceability. This is, again, I see a lot of organizations that have multiple intakes for particular needs from the wider organization or their customer base. So being able to bring this down into a single intake pipe, being able to qualify them, align them to planning, and align them to the overall strategy, what that does is it starts to give you that full traceability of are you actioning the right asks from your user base. Are you developing the right capabilities? And you’ve got full traceability, not just in terms of the delivery of it, but also the realization of the value.

Financial resources. The financials built into it, so in terms of costs for planning versus what was realized. So what was the projected cost for a particular project? And did you actually hit that? And did it deliver against its core or its higher-level needs—the strategic aspect of it—rollup of costs?

Resource planning. We talked a little bit about it, but understanding which resources are aligned to which projects. I talked about the changing priorities in the last couple of years and how they’re driving a much more reactive need against the project. So being able to move resources from one project to another and understanding what the impact is of that or seeing if you’ve got projects which are too many or not enough resources aligned to them, so, therefore, they don’t have the right capacity.

Being able to look at time tracking. So collecting in real time what’s happening with the individuals that are doing the work and not relying on multiple different solutions to try and reconcile all of that information back into a single source. Having that in place.

Integration burden. It’s a reduced integration burden. There’s no integration burden because it’s on a single platform. And a lot of our customers are starting to recognize the value of this as we start to roll out more and more solutions.

And then the AI workflows. Claudia’s gonna talk a little bit about this just now in the next step. But it really is about bringing in more and more AI and automation to understand what are the challenges in delivering some of the projects. How do you manage the resources intelligently? What other automation do we need to bring in in order to—automation in terms of the status updates and the reporting that’s needed across the different levels. So all of this is being built in to not just the platform but also the solution as well.

So hopefully that gives you a sense of why to transition to ServiceNow. And now Claudia’s going to show you it an action.

Claudia Lee

Thanks David. I’m gonna steal the screen from you.

So, in the next about 10 to 15 minutes, what I’m gonna do is a high-level overview of the day in the life of a project manager as well as a team member working on projects and what their life would look like within ServiceNow SPM.

We’re gonna first start off within the project workspace, so once a project manager logs into ServiceNow, this is gonna be their one-stop shop for understanding what projects they’re assigned to and what projects they need to manage and execute on. So you’ll see here within this specific view, there are a number of projects that have already been initiated for this project manager, Megan. If Megan were to initiate new projects, typically that would go through a demand intake cycle, as David mentioned earlier, where there’s certain gating and governance processes around assessments, scoring, and prioritization. For this demonstration, we’re just gonna focus on creating a net-new project within this workspace and bypassing that demand intake process.

So from this view, you’ll notice there’s a couple of options for me to create new projects from a template or just to create a project shell. If we are creating new projects from a template, it’s going to allow me to select from a number of preconfigured templates in which you already have a work breakdown structure or different details within that project established. This is great if you do have projects that are repeatable or recurring every year in which they’re going to follow the same tasks and phases in which you’re going to have a template created and automatically applied to net-new projects to remove a lot of that manual overhead that your project managers may have when initiating those new projects.

I’m gonna navigate into a project that I’ve already created with a template here. So let’s say we do have a project to replace our end-of-life project management tool with a template that I’ve already applied to this project. You’ll notice that my work breakdown structure is already populated here with key phases and tasks within those phases. On the right side of this view, you’re also gonna see your traditional Gantt views as well, showing the dependencies and milestones within the project as well. I can easily click into a specific phase or task within this project to get details on the right side here of what this project task entails, who is assigned to this project task, and also details of the type of task that it is. So whether it’s a standard project task that I’m assigning off to a resource to complete, it may be a deliverable task in which you’ll notice here that I may need to upload certain documents or attach certain links to, or it could be a stage gating task that requires additional gatekeepers for further approval before we can proceed with this project. A lot of this is going to be automated through our workflow engine so that we can start to trigger off certain notifications and approvals as part of the project execution.

Within the project workspace, you’re also going to notice that there is a number of different tabs a PM can navigate to as they’re starting to update their project plans, update their forecast and their status reports. So let’s dive a little bit deeper into some of these additional tabs on the left here, starting off with our financial views. So as part of this process, we may want to start to track the costs associated with our projects, and these costs can include labor costs, software costs, hardware costs, or any type of cost that needs to be associated. And we can do this in the form of cost plans here. Now, this specific financial view is going to give different viewpoints or modes for you to display the financials of the project, whether you’re tracking your planned versus actuals or if you need to do a forecasted look at what you have within the project and how much budget you have remaining, or if you need to look at it from more of a budget allocation perspective, where you’re actually going in and requesting budget from your finance managers or your portfolio managers. You’ll also notice the key thing here is around how I’m categorizing these costs and the ability for me to start to track OpEx versus CapEx costs in addition to creating these cost plans.

Very important with managing your projects is managing a RAID or redact log. So we’re giving you a centralized place to manage a lot of these different artifacts here and being able to create net-new artifacts directly within the project itself. We spoke a bit earlier about having this integrated with some of the processes like your risk management, your ITSM, your enterprise architecture as well, and that that’s already embedded within the SPM solution. So if we do have risks that need to be elevated to enterprise risks and follow through to various risk assessments, we have that interconnectivity with our integrated risk management solution as well as if we do need to request a change request to go through our CAB processes because we’re deploying some new code to a product, that’s also already integrated with our change processes as part of our project controls.

The last piece I’m gonna show here that’s super important from a PM perspective is the generation of status reports. So, similar to how we can have templates to generate our project plans, we also have the ability to create different templates for our status reporting as well as any sort of documentation that we need to keep track of as part of the project here. And what I’m able to do is easily generate a new status report, come in here once a week, fill out the information on the status of my my project, update the RAG of each of those different components, and then be able to create a lovely status report summary page here that’s automatically going to pull certain attributes and information from the project like the percent completion and a lot of the financial and resourcing costs as well as pulling in milestones and the information that was submitted through the status report.

David mentioned a bit about our AI capabilities, and with Now Assist, we also have a quick way to summarize our documents or status reports if we do need to give a quick update to our stakeholders on what the status of our project is and where we are.

We’re gonna now talk a bit about some of the resource management capabilities as well within SPM. And you’ll notice here that I have the ability to toggle on this resource assignments panel. That’s gonna show me the resources that have been allocated to my specific project. From a project manager perspective, you’re gonna see that they’re gonna get full visibility into who those resources are, what the effort that’s been estimated or assigned to this project is, but also visibility into their availability. So you’ll see here that we’re giving a heat map kind of visualization to give an understanding of where we may have resources that are overallocated on our project. And I could further click into a specific month or week to get further details around what other projects this resource may be assigned to, what their effort is and utilization. And I may have to do some negotiation with a resource manager or project manager to go ahead and get that resource on my project or to do some reallocation of resources and balancing that.

Now, this was all from a project manager perspective, but let’s talk a bit about what it would look like from a team member perspective who’s being assigned tasks to this project. They’re going to navigate over to our collaborative work management workspace to get a view of all work that they may be assigned to. This could include project work, but also other type of work across the enterprise, like operational work. The My Work view here is going to give them a central, unified view into everything that they need to pay attention to or are assigned to for that week. And you’ll see here that, based on the type of items that we’re showing in this list view, it’s not just project tasks. We can also pull in risk. We can pull in demand tasks. We can pull in agile-type work as well as some of those ITAM tasks that they may be assigned to.

Now it’s going to give you a board here to give you an idea of what items I have open. How many are overdue, and I could start to tackle my day-to-day tasks by clicking into one of these reports. And I’m gonna click into my highest critical tasks that I’ve been assigned to here. Again, we’re gonna see a list of what each of these tasks are. And the great thing is from within this workspace, a team member can easily start to action off each of those tasks directly from this view. So if I am assigned a specific project task here, I can open it directly within my workspace view, get an idea of what this task is. I can also upload any attachments. For this one, I am uploading a BRD documentation. And then being able to go off and close this task directly from my workspace.

Now, as someone is closing off tasks and working on these tasks that they’re assigned to, they also need to track and log their time against it. We also offer a timesheet portal as part of the SPM solution for your resources to log time against project work but also their operational work that they may be assigned to. So in this example here, we can start to see there’s a number of different tasks, whether they’re project tasks or incidents, that this resource has been working on for the week. We can easily generate time cards based on those tasks and then have the ability to further categorize these tasks, if they are project tasks, to refine and understand exactly what they were doing and then give them the ability to easily log time within each of these days. And I’m just going to arbitrarily put in some numbers here. And you’ll notice as I am logging time, it is going to update the top view here and give a breakdown of the amount of hours I’m logging against those different tasks.

What I’m not going to go through in much detail today for the demonstration but I will mention is there is a full workflow available for submitting these timesheets and having it go through an approval process by a project manager or a resource manager to then look at the timesheets, approve it, and then have it processed and update the project’s financials automatically so that you are able to track the the labor costs, the expenses, as well as actuals against the forecasts that you have for your resource effort.

And in my last couple of minutes, I do want to talk about some of the expanded capabilities that David has mentioned earlier around strategic planning and being able to get a rollup view of all the work that may be happening across the enterprise or across the portfolio. Within our strategic planning workspace, we’re going to give you the ability to look at all work from different lenses—so whether it’s at a corporate level, a product level, or a portfolio level—and be able to understand alignment to your strategic priorities and goals, provide some sort of standardized scoring framework to help with ranking and prioritizing items. We can easily start to see which items are prioritized here, what their score is, and then manipulate the ranking of this within our plan here to identify which ones we do want to prioritize and visually see within our road map here.

So the last view I’m going to leave off with is our road map view to give an example of some of the reporting and visualizations that we can do to collaborate with our stakeholders on the road map or the plan that we have committed to of all these projects for the remainder of the year or for the next fiscal year. So we could start to see within this view each of these bars is going to represent a project or demand or an epic that we want to prioritize. I can start to track key milestones within this plan, understand where there’s dependencies or conflicts in those dependencies and make adjustments. And more importantly, we can also start to see how these are lining back to our goals and our strategies. So I may have certain things here that haven’t been aligned yet, and it’s important for me to ensure that we do have that alignment as we start to commit this work for the year.

So with that, I will stop here and pass it back to, I believe, Kevin and the Ondaro team to talk about how we can start to create those action plans for transitioning off of MS Project Online to ServiceNow SPM.

Kevin O’Brien

Yeah, I talk to this. So we do have prebuilt implementation approaches for a Project—specifically, Project-only. About eight to 10 weeks is a traditional implementation timeline for us. If you’re interested in doing more—so David and Claudia were showing a lot of the capabilities that are available in the SPM product suite that you get when you buy into SPM. We can also do—we can go further with a 12- to 14-week implementation when we’re doing Project and demand and resource multiple capabilities. And so one of the considerations as you’re trying to put together your path forward is what level of capability set are you looking for? Is it a Project-only? Do you want to go to those higher levels that David and Claudia were talking about?

And so those considerations help drive what the overall time scale looks like. I think the time scale slide here is also showing what I was talking to before. It is really important that you’re beginning your implementation path by the time you get to Q3 2026 if you’re going to have your new solution in place by September 2026. And so by the end of Q2, you really need to have—actually, I think I’m reading the slide wrong. So you need to have your budget approval finished before the end of Q2 so you can begin on your implementation and really have your implementation path in place prior to, because the end of Q3 would be September. Right, Jeff?

Jeff Butler

Yep. For sure. And as we said, we will be sharing the recording of this call today as well as the questions. So do you wanna talk about any of the—well, I guess we’ve got the questions in there.

Kevin O’Brien

Well, I’ll just mention a couple of things at the bottom of the slide.

Data migration. I think it’s really important when you think about—when you’re moving to a new technology, there are different approaches our clients take. Oftentimes, if you’re migrating existing projects that are in flight, one of the native capabilities built into SPM is the ability to upload Microsoft project schedules. And so what Claudia was showing in that work breakdown structure, you can natively import those into workspace that Claudia was just showing. So that’s one of the things built in.

But it’s important to consider data migration in your scoping efforts. Because as you’re getting off of this platform, it’s not just the work breakdown structure. There might be multiple things you need to migrate off of. And so it’s important you have a good thought process around what does data migration look like.

And then also, are you giving yourself the opportunity to look at your overall process as you’re putting in place your plan to move to the next solution? We often find it advantageous not to lift and shift and to really think through how do we actually transform it and give ourselves the benefit of a more streamlined process and put that in place as what your requirements are. And so those are some of the considerations.

And then the Ondaro implementation methodology, we have a standardized methodology that is kind of scalable depending on how complex you are interested in going. And so we can talk with you offline on what that looks like.

Jeff Butler

I know there were some questions that were in the chat that were already addressed. But are there any other—anyone brave enough to come off mute and and ask a question of our experts on the panel here today?

David McPherson

I think Claudia just did that.

Kevin O’Brien

Oh, she did? OK. Sorry. OK, there we go. Thank you.

Claudia Lee

Yeah, Carol, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to show some of the plan versus actual use from a resource effort perspective. We can definitely follow up with some videos that we have prerecorded if you’re interested in that.

Carol Ward

Yeah, I guess what I was questioning is the fact that when they put their time in, is it updating I’m 50 percent done with this task on the project, not just the financials? It’s actually updating the project plan?

Claudia Lee

So it won’t automatically. That’s gonna be based off the closure of the task itself. So if you recall seeing me going into the My Work view for a team member and then closing off the task, that would be updating the completion of the project.

Carol Ward

OK, if there’s any pull you can have with ServiceNow to allow that as an option to not only update the financials but also update the percent complete on the project timeline or the project tasks, that would be greatly appreciated.

Claudia Lee

I do believe we have some folks from the ServiceNow side here listening in. So we could definitely pass that feedback along.

Jeff Butler

Fantastic. OK.

Ward, Carol

If you need somebody to talk to about it, feel free to contact me.

Jeff Butler

Thank you,

Claudia Lee

Will do, Carol.

David McPherson

That’s been created as a demand already. Yeah, because we follow our own processes.

Jeff Butler

Indeed, any last questions or thoughts before we wrap up here?

Kevin O’Brien

I see Arjit asked a question around data migration limited to schedules. No, there’s a number of data import capabilities built into the platform natively that SPM takes advantage of. And so if you have a risk register with risks, issues, and custom fields, we can certainly import that data into SPM. We need to take a look at do you need to add additional fields, or is there a way we can utilize the out-of-the-box fields. But that is a typical conversation we have, and there’s a number of out-of-the-box import capabilities we can rely upon.

Jeff Butler

Thank you for that question as well. Appreciate everybody. Any follow-up questions, you please feel free to reach out to me, and I’m happy to get the question into the right hands. But thank you very much to our friends from ServiceNow for being a part of this call today. Kevin, thank you very much for being a part of this. And as I said, hopefully this was a valuable use of your time. And we look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you very much.