Is It Time to Update Your ServiceNow Roadmap?
ServiceNow is an increasingly popular tool for companies undertaking digital transformations. The solution’s appeal is largely its comprehensiveness, enabling businesses to use a single platform for their ITSM needs.
While ServiceNow has vast implications for business uptime and optimized workflows, IT leaders ought to make strategic decisions concerning ServiceNow adoption. Implementing, expanding or updating ServiceNow can be a major undertaking. It’s wise for IT leaders to develop a detailed roadmap to ensure steady progress.
Develop a ServiceNow Strategy
Define your starting point, major milestones and success metrics to keep your team – and any outside vendors – on track.
Define your starting point
Whether this is the beginning of your ServiceNow implementation or you’re expanding ServiceNow into other areas of the enterprise, you should define your starting point for the project. Here’s some top considerations:
- Resources: Define the resources you will need in the short and long term to see the project to completion. This will help you understand more fully the timeline for the project as well as how to communicate your resource needs exactly with stakeholders.
- Fix any previous issues: If you have any issues in your current ServiceNow environment, then resolve them at the beginning. Assess your entire IT ecosystem for the proper data sources and collection. Every IT innovation starts with cleaned, prepped data. Your ServiceNow upgrade will go smoothly when your assessments show a fully primed system.
- The Goal: Knowing where to start means knowing what the end goal of the project is. If you’re implementing a new product or service or simply upgrading something that already exists in your IT environment, then you ought to define that clearly. It will help you know what ServiceNow features and products to consider. Most importantly, you will pinpoint who the changes will affect within your team or organization.
Major ServiceNow roadmap milestones
There is no Mount Everest hiker who reached the peak in one day. They chunked their trip into smaller hikes and milestones that led to the larger goal at the end. The same goes for your ServiceNow strategy. It’s a massive lift that doesn’t happen in one day.
Define your milestones for the project with your team, such as: migrating your applications and teams over to the ServiceNow platform, integrating with existing applications, training your teams, building and automating IT processes, etc. Review how these changes will impact your team and strategize how to make each of them as smooth as possible. If you’re working with a third party vendor, they will offer guidance and expertise at every checkpoint.
Your milestones will depend fully on what you are changing in your environment, but it’s important to take the journey in strides. Checkpoints will allow you to assess, adjust, and prepare for the next milestone of the project. Remember: measure twice, cut once.
READ NOW → “6 Mistakes to Avoid in Your ServiceNow Implementation”
Success metrics for your ServiceNow Roadmap
How do you know if a ServiceNow implementation is working or producing ROI? You measure the results! At each milestone on the ServiceNow roadmap, you should assess and analyze the following success metrics:
- Identify KPIs and diagnostic metrics: What were you looking to change in the environment? Usually with an IT system upgrade, the ROI comes from tools elimination, consolidation, infrastructure optimization, and a shift of resource allocation to free people for innovative IT support (as opposed to spending hours searching for the cause of an issue, for instance). After you’ve upgraded your ServiceNow process, take note of where you started and run metrics to measure what has changed and why. Better or worse?
- Build playbooks to act on diagnostic metrics: Document the changes to your IT system and team. Keep a playbook that includes what you changed and how it has impacted aspects of the organization. This playbook will come in handy when you decide to re-assess and make the next ServiceNow upgrade. You can revisit your milestones, review the diagnostic metrics, and project what the next change will produce.
- Build dashboards to visualize progress and support clear decision-making: One of the strengths of ServiceNow is its ability to scale with your business. Measuring the success of your ServiceNow implementation is paramount for supporting decisions that scale the business. Build dashboards that help you visualize your resource allocation, manage hardware and software licenses, and see where you’re saving in costs.
Communicate at all levels
It might seem like an obvious strategy, but 64% of organizations fail to see revenue growth from their digital initiatives due to siloed organizational communications. Do not be a statistic. If you’ve already implemented ServiceNow previously in your organization, then your teams ought to have been familiar with the change management process. Reminders are helpful though!
Successful ServiceNow adoption is not only about implementing a tool in your environment. Prep your teams and consider how these changes affect them. What training will they need? What resources can you or a consultant provide to them? What questions or push back can you expect and how will you address them? Each milestone of your ServiceNow Roadmap should be communicated at every level of your organization. Make your vision public to those it impacts. You will see how it promotes positive change leading to faster scaling.
Adjust the ServiceNow Roadmap as you go
Don’t be afraid to revisit your roadmap and adjust your strategy. Business needs change, and you have to be able to adapt to those changes with the right IT support. Take these considerations into account when you adjust your ServiceNow Roadmap:
- Ensure everything works as intended with all the data in the right place and format
- Maintain your system with cleaned data and security precautions
- Train IT teams or hire professionals to support the infrastructure
- Monitor essential KPIs and revisit your diagnostics playbook to measure your milestones and goals
Maximize the value of your ServiceNow Investment
ServiceNow offers a platform to transform business and accelerate outcomes with workflows that work. This kind of performance doesn’t happen overnight though. If you are interested in a ServiceNow implementation or taking your ServiceNow strategy to the next level, consider working with a ServiceNow consultant.
When we talk to IT leaders like you, conversations can often get stuck in talking about a ServiceNow module rather than maximizing the potential of the entire platform. At Windward, we have the industry-specific expertise to help you define a long-term ServiceNow roadmap to align your processes, people, data, and technology to use the NOW platform to its fullest.
