Four Steps to Bring Your ServiceNow Journey to the Right Destination

Smoother workflows. Fewer operational silos. Faster error resolution. The ServiceNow Platform offer a world of advantages to businesses that want to scale, innovate, and adapt alongside the best in the business. However, you can’t quantum leap to the future logistics of your ServiceNow journey.

Anyone who has gone through their own technology transformation can tell you it’s not a simple Point A to Point B expedition. A successful ServiceNow implementation requires a variety of intermediary logistical steps and stops along the way. Plus, any unplanned turbulence or deviation from the planned course can prevent your project from reaching its destination.

Every solution requires a detailed map of the journey ahead but understanding the necessary waypoints in the journey can give you the context to overcome any hurdles. Ask yourself these questions as you move through your ServiceNow implementation–and consider whether having an experienced guide would get you to your destination more efficiently and effectively.

What Outcomes Are You Trying to Achieve? (What Is Your Destination?)

Adopting a ServiceNow solution is more than just integrating new technology into your tech stack. It’s about creating digital workflows that optimize business processes and allow your people to harness the right data and systems to do their best work. With that in mind, you need to ask the right questions to get to the bottom of which solutions will help your organization accomplish your goals:

• Are you eager to create scalable IT operations? Without frameworks to manage IT workflows and assets, your organization could struggle with expanded workloads. IT Service Management or IT Operations Management can automate and optimize your behind-the-scenes processes.
• Do you need to increase employee collaboration and productivity? Collaborative companies evolve faster, but not if their people don’t share an understanding of efficiency or productivity. Global Business Service Delivery unlocks cohesive workflows across a distributed workforce.
• Do you need to optimize project investment and ensure the planned ROI is delivered? If you struggle to maintain project and payoff visibility, you’ll probably fall short of your goals. Strategic Portfolio Manager can help strategize and deliver outcomes in one place.
• Do you need to create a seamless customer experience? Your customers are frustrated because they are lost in the shuffle. Customer Service Management can deepen engagement, streamline outreach, or resolve issues proactively.

These are just a few possible objectives that ServiceNow can solve. If you’re not familiar with the entire ServiceNow suite of solutions, certified Premier Partners can help translate your business targets into the proper cloud-based capabilities.

Which Use Cases Are the Most Fruitful? (What Interim Destination Is Needed to Refuel?)

Walking the entire Appalachian trail in a day isn’t possible, and neither is implementing every aspect of the ServiceNow Platform right out of the gates. Even with an understanding of the spectrum of ServiceNow solutions that apply to your organization, a massive undertaking can slow delivery, dampen enthusiasm, and delay results.

Setting your ServiceNow implementation project plan on the right fotting requires one of two approaches: identifying low-hanging fruit that benefit a key function of your business or pinpointing urgent challenges that can impair your operations. Again, this requires having a firm understanding of the intended goals.

One success story comes from the City of Los Angeles. When COVID-19 reached the U.S., metropolitan areas had to transform operations and services overnight. As home to four million Angelinos, the City wanted to ensure they could quickly facilitate rapid testing and minimize the financial impact of stay-at-home orders. With solutions ranging from the Strategic Portfolio Management to the App Engine, LA was able to implement “a fully functional COVID test appointment app” and a rent-relief system that made close to $350 million in emergency rent payments. Their investment made a measurable impact.

Who Will Be Your ServiceNow Champion? (Who Needs to Be with You in the Car?)

Even with a clear business value, successful solution implementation requires someone inside the organization who is invested in the completion of the project. In short, you need a person who will advocate for the solution and champion buy-in among those less familiar with the capabilities of ServiceNow.

How do you determine the ideal person? Technical expertise isn’t always the deciding factor. Instead, the right fit for your ServiceNow champion should have the following qualities:

• Clear Communication: Your advocate for the ServiceNow implementation should be able to convey information about the project, the business case, and the potential ROI in terminology and motivation that is calibrated to each audience. Speaking over or under the heads of an in-house team member can make people wonder, “What’s the point?”
• Strong Leadership: Even if you are working with an implementation partner, you need someone in-house to take the baton and run towards the finish line. Coordinating everything from planning sessions and stakeholder interviews to rollout and knowledge transfer requires an assertive person who isn’t afraid to get hands-on to promote implementation.
• Business Knowledge: Your new ServiceNow solution isn’t being sketched onto a blank canvas. There are entire processes, cultures, people, and technical tools with which your champion needs to blend the final product. By electing someone who has an in-depth knowledge of all the diverse pieces of your business, you prevent an avoidable clash after go-live.

How Will You Maintain the Solution When You Go Live? (Where to Next?)

Launch is the perfect time to think about what’s next. Once you have created your plan, customized your features, integrated systems, migrated data, tested the results, and gone live, there’s a need to promote adoption and overcome any lingering challenges. The champion is partially responsible for driving maintenance, but there’s nuance to certain elements of go-live support and training that requires the touch of an expert.

From an ongoing upkeep standpoint, an in-house specialist or a solutions team in the ServiceNow Partner Program can apply their knowledge to sophisticated issues that arise, answer niche questions, and troubleshoot thornier bugs on the backend. More than that, they become an ally who can help your team maximize the potential of your solution and explore new opportunities to work smarter, faster, and better.

Can You Get Better Results with a ServiceNow Guide?

Even if you follow the above rules for implementing ServiceNow, your organization can experience some conflict along the way or run into some growing pains that prevent you from achieving your full goal from the outset.

When there’s so much potential to elevate your business beyond IT, it pays to choose a collaborator that can act as your pathfinder throughout the process. Working with a certified partner like D2M can ensure that you identify your foremost goals, combine them with quick and sustainable wins, and guide your implementation plan through the entire lifecycle (even into stress-free go-live process). No matter your destination, we’ll work to get your business there.

Are you looking for a guide through the ServiceNow implementation project plan? D2M can take the lead. Our seasoned ServiceNow experts can handle the planning and challenges so your organization receives top-tier results.