11 Steps To Implement ServiceNow ITBM In Your Business
The successful implementation of ServiceNow ITBM can potentially change the way businesses function. It is proven to increase efficiency, reduce time to market and improve service delivery by multiple folds. However, a change this big requires planning and management. In order to leverage the full power of this tool, it is vital to follow the right implementation plan and ensure a quick ROI by eliminating unfortunate pitfalls or detours. Let’s look at the essential steps of ServiceNow ITBM implementation.
- Define and Measure Business Goals
What is it that you’re looking for from ServiceNow IT Business Management? Whether you want to improve your service delivery, outages, customer experience, or employee experience; it cannot be achieved until you document your goals and target outcomes. Take some time to clearly define your vision, drivers, desired results, and key milestones on the roadmap. Lay down some metrics to accurately track results against performance. Start with understanding the major challenges within your organization in several departments and explore how ITBM implementation can help solve them. Once you’ve identified all that you need, distinguishing features that your firm requires right away from those that the business can mature into. With this exercise, your priorities, goals, and objectives will become crystal clear.
2. Engage your ServiceNow ITBM Sponsor
Most stakeholders at a firm are not from the ‘IT background’. Yet, it is crucial for a successful ServiceNow IT Business Management implementation, to ensure consistent engagement and reviews from your executive sponsors. Make sure you pick the right team of executive sponsors who are committed to successful implementation and continual engagement. Engaging all major stakeholders from the beginning also ensures that the entire firm is benefiting, and also eliminates the chances of re-work later on.
3. Find an Experienced and Certified Partner
Involve an expert in the planning stage and not directly in the implementation stage. ServiceNow implementation partners bring with them years of experience and a thorough understanding of the platform and modules. They offer the thought leadership that businesses need to align organizational goals to processes. Depending upon their industry experience, these experts can also alert you with potential challenges you might face in the future, and better prepare you for the same.
4. Opt for a Phased Approach
There are two ways to go about ServiceNow IT Business Management implementation — the big-bang approach and the phased approach. Most medium to large-scale organizations require multiple ServiceNow products and therefore the big bang approach can become complicated to implement. This level of process change and adoption requires a phased approach. Plan your phases carefully and track your progress through each phase. Also, make sure to capture notable wins and lessons to make better strategies for the future.
5. Define and Limit OOTB Features
Given the flexibility of ServiceNow Managed Services, it is tempting to make excessive customizations. However, unnecessary customizations can cause increased costs, downtime, delay in implementation, and other complications. Therefore, communicate the importance of prioritizing out-of-the-box (OOTB) features and encourage only legitimate customizations.
6. Answer Key Architecture Questions
Access your current infrastructure and develop your architecture strategy keeping in mind technical aspects as well as business objectives. Invest in the right technical foundations considering not just your current requirements but also future ones. Assess the impact of ServiceNow ITBM architectural requirements on your business objectives to help you prioritize. Take the support of your ServiceNow implementation partners to identify specific requirements for cloud hosting.
7. Train your Teams
Training internal teams to enable transformation through ServiceNow Managed Services is often taken lightly. However, without a comprehensive and extensive training strategy, it is impossible to take full advantage of the services. Poor and inadequate training is the perfect recipe for slow adoption and an even slower ROI. There are multiple training options available for ServiceNow training that your ServiceNow implementation partners can assist you with. Another important tip is to create separate training programs for your maintenance team, implementation team, and end-users, as they have completely different roles to play in the transformation.
8. Approach with Value-Driven Governance
ServiceNow implementation across the enterprise often involves multiple stakeholders, each with different requirements and goals. It is easy to get lost among so many opinions which can slow down the implementation process remarkably. One way to avoid such a conflict is to create precise decision structures defining who approves different categories of what decisions. A dynamic governance process with clearly defined roles and responsibilities is important not just for technical governance but also for strategic and business guidance.
9. Strategize Change Management
Implementing ITBM services is just as much a technical shift as it is a process shift. Therefore make sure you reserve a time and budget for appropriate training, especially for those who are most affected by the change. Conducting seminars, workshops, demonstrations and other training activities improves efficiency and confidence among teams. These key people then become peer influencers who can effectively champion change across the firm.
10. Establish a championship strategy
Champions are those critical members of the internal ServiceNow implementation team who have the potential to help their colleagues build, grow and sustain the ServiceNow ITBM transformation. They can identify potential beneficiaries of the process, engage them with case studies, help them explore the benefits and significantly enhance ServiceNow expansion and growth.
11. Create a Proof-of-Concept (POC)
It is not uncommon to face some resistance from uninformed stakeholders about the new ServiceNow process transformations. Create a proof of concepts (POCs) to demonstrate the value of implementing ITBM. Your ServiceNow partners will be helpful in creating these documents. Use these tools to allow your stakeholders to experience the look and feel of the potential improvements ITBM can bring to the table.
Planning and defining a roadmap are often the most underrated yet critical components for the successful implementation of ServiceNow ITBM. Finding the right ServiceNow partner can play an instrumental role in that process, and therefore, a key decision for businesses to make. Get started today!
