ServiceNow Consultants: The Key to Your Business Transformation
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What is ServiceNow?
When asked to explain ServiceNow® and its capabilities, I always get a little excited. I hope people are as thrilled as I am every time we help someone discover how it can make their organization work smarter and faster.
ServiceNow is a cloud platform for workflow automation that helps you break down silos, tap into AI and scale your operations- all this while integrating your existing technologies into one data model.
Simply put, ServiceNow is the intelligent platform for business transformation trusted by the world’s top corporations. And for a very good reason: it makes work flow better for everyone. Read here how companies in the retail sector accelerated their transformations with ServiceNow.
Now that we have context, let’s dive into today’s topic: how can you maximize your business transformation through your ServiceNow implementation journey?
Beyond Technology: People
The difference between implementing technology and truly transforming your business with technology lies in how much you focus on what should be the most important outcome of your transformation journey: enhancing the employee and customer experience.
If you are not making efforts to improve experience, you risk demanding that your implementation team incorporate your existing workflow and process inefficiencies into your ServiceNow instance without even realizing it. Not only will this waste the potential of your investment, but your users will continue to be as frustrated as before.
A successful digital transformation requires more than just adding technology to the equation- it requires the courage to do the right thing for the users: change where it matters most and manage that change appropriately.
Designing the Solution
Typically, you would bring in a project team to deliver the ServiceNow implementation. The implementation consultants and business analysts collect information on existing workflows, processes, and technologies, and recommend integrations and automations in ServiceNow. They also gather information from you and your stakeholders about needs, desired outcomes, goals, and special requirements.
Based on their assessment, they design the technical solution and decide what will be configured, what will be customized, and recommend where it’s best to stay out-of-the-box.
That is what your run-of-the-mill implementation project team would do. But think of every single workflow currently in motion in your enterprise. Everything that makes people work with each other, request things from one another, provide services to one another, resolve things for your clients, or deliver things and services to them.
Now think of the many diverse pieces of disconnected technology you use to accomplish all those activities and how difficult it is to get people in different business units worldwide to work together seamlessly.
- How many times do client inquiries get lost in emails?
- How many people do you have to ping to figure out who to ask for help?
- How many tasks are an organizational nightmare to navigate?
- How many valuable hours are lost every year because of manual workload, miscommunications and inefficiencies?
To make thoughtful improvements on these issues, it is best for your implementation team to include consultants specialized in process engineering and governance who can help you detect waste and advise you on how to optimize your processes and workflows. Not only will you learn how industry standards help you take full advantage of out-of-the-box capabilities, but you will also have more options for accomplishing the same goals, leading to greater opportunities for innovation and automation.
Equally important, ensure user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and/or customer experience (CX) consultants are part of the implementation team as well. Conduct proper research and design validation, so all the journeys users embark on are worth experiencing. Making sure your journeys are accessible and intuitive will help increase overall satisfaction. To learn more about the strategic value of UX, check out this article in our blog.
Process consultants and UX/EX/CX designers are key partners of the implementation consultants in deciding how to craft the best ServiceNow experience for you and your people.
Truly valuable to get these insights right, isn’t it? 😉
Don’t Try to Boil the Ocean
It is incredibly tempting to try to fix years of troubles in one single go-live. This approach, however, is far from realistic in terms of timeline and cost. You would be stuck in a loop of endless scope creep and stakeholder frustration (we’ve all been there!).
How you define project scope and delivery methodology will be critical for your success. The recommended course of action for complex projects like these is to prioritize areas for improvement.
Have the consultants assess the organization's status, identify the low-hanging fruit, and suggest a roadmap based on what will have the most impact. Automate everything you can automate, even when the process is not perfect. Focus on the most important end user journeys and prioritize their simplification. Future-proof your architecture and your data model so you can continue driving transformations in iterations.
Delivering everything in one go has a low success rate. It is also a hard sell for stakeholders, especially if go-live dates need to be adjusted. Creating a sustainable roadmap that delivers in iterations will help you pivot as needed and ensure your ServiceNow platform evolution is managed as any other digital product would be.
Managing Change
Last, but not least: communicate! The most critical part of any transformation project is making sure your collaborators and clients understand what is changing for them, why it is changing and when it will happen. Make sure the purpose is explained from their perspective: not why it matters to you, but why it matters to them. How does this change benefit them? How are you making it easier for them to get things done?
Your implementation team will be successful if resistance to change and friction are minimized, while adoption and engagement are maximized. This key task should be executed with the assistance of organizational change management (OCM) consultants.
OCM consultants can identify your target audience and segment it into different personas, creating a plan tailored to their needs. They can identify potential adoption risks and help prepare communication, training and roadshow assets ready for go-live, as well as provide continuous communication and training support throughout the entire roadmap execution.
Let’s Talk!
At Switch we prioritize the sustainability and scalability of your implementation, making sure we don’t just design good workflows but also unlock your digital transformation with our ServiceNow premier consultancy services. We want you and your users to love ServiceNow as much as we do!
If you’d like to discuss your transformation journey and/or support needs, contact the ServiceNow Studio today to discover how our multidisciplinary team can help you 🙂
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