Mary leads the IT Department of a regional financial service organization. In the wake of COVID-19 and the great reshuffle, she’s been tasked with finding a platform that will allow employees greater flexibility in where they work while also ensuring compliance with strict regulatory requirements for financial enterprises around the globe.
After much research, she and her team have chosen to deploy the Now Platform ® to improve the customer experience, increase security, streamline productivity, and give employees more ownership over where they work.
Deploying ServiceNow is no small project. It’s a long game with a lot of moving parts. If done right, the platform can positively impact every part of your organization and deliver a strong ROI. Engaging the right service partner for implementation can make all the difference. ServiceNow makes it easy to get started by listing all their service partners on their partner finder.
Each of these professional services firms have the right balance of industry and expertise to ensure things go smoothly. You can leverage the array of certifications their consultants and developers hold to ensure you get the most value from the Now Platform.
But the right tools are only part of the story. Before you can start evaluating ServiceNow Elite Partners, make sure you have the right players on your internal team. Kicking off an enterprise project as robust as a ServiceNow implementation requires stakeholder buy-in at all levels. Without the right internal team on board, all the time and money spent on your project could be for naught.
After all, a ServiceNow implementation is at once an IT project and a business transformation project. The initiative must involve communication among all stakeholders from the C-suite to the end users. Each player must understand how much the project will impact your organization.
Meanwhile, you must get a sense of how change saturated your organization is – allowing you to develop an organizational change management strategy to directly assess employee concerns from the start.
ServiceNow Partner Evaluation Team – Recommended players
Assembling your internal team is no easy feat.
Not to worry. ServiceNow has a list of characters who should be in the room where it happens, so to speak. We’ll dive into recommendations to start, and then add a few of our own.
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An executive sponsor
Every project needs a champion from the C-suite. This member of the executive team who sees value in the ServiceNow platform and has the vision to see how the platform can help the company achieve its strategic goals. Executive sponsorship is essential for any project to be successful. When employees see leadership championing a particular initiative, they are likely to adopt it as well.
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A Now Platform® Owner.
This IT Leader will, ultimately, own the Now Platform®. They’re the point person who assumes responsibility for any issues that arise on the Platform, make decisions about what configurations should happen on the platform and steer the digital transformation process on the platform. Inviting the Platform Owner to the decision-making process empowers them to “own” the platform from the outset and make decisions about the technology they will eventually be responsible for.
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Members from procurement and vendor management.
The folks responsible for ensuring the procurement and vendor process stays in alignment with company objectives. They are experts at researching and identifying vendors who will deliver the most value for the company. They are also responsible for maintaining a positive relationship your chosen ServiceNow Elite Partner.
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Members of finance and legal
Before starting you’ll need to work with these folks to have an approved, set budget for partner services. When project begins, the finance team can approve incidental expenses along the way.
Once you’ve selected a partner, your representative from legal can review, negotiate and approve the contracts.
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Security
Your security team needs to be involved in any new IT project. Especially when you are implementing an enterprise service management platform like the Now Platform®. After all, data security remains an imperative for any enterprise regardless of industry vertical. Members of your security team can evaluate the Platform and the partner to ensure they build the platform to conform to security best practices.
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Program Management
ServiceNow recommends the evaluation team include representatives from Program Management. Crossfuze finds that Program Management at this point in the process is optional and the need can vary from organization to organization. But once deployment begins your ServiceNow deployment should have a program management team to ensure the implementation adds value to your organization. And to assess impact, prioritize, set milestones and keep the project on time and on budget.
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Program Management
Business unit managers whose departments will be most impacted by the change should also be part of your selection team. Choose unit managers who can liaise with executives, represent their business needs and identify how much support will be needed as business users make the transition to ServiceNow applications.
In addition to each of these recommendations, Crossfuze recommends inviting leaders from Human Resources and Communications and Organizational Change Management into the process from the beginning. Team members from these employee-serving groups have important data to share. They provide information on whether transformation projects align with employee skill sets. They have a pulse on employee sentiment and any change saturation in the enterprise. These teams may even be able to plan to provide staff resources to support employees during your implementation.
Particularly, enterprises who address Organizational Change Management concerns from the beginning by inviting an OCM representative to the selection committee can see higher success rates with their digital transformation. These professionals align your technical implementation to a plan for preparing employees through change strategy and planning.
Closing Thoughts
Keep in mind that each these stakeholders, whether they work closely with your ServiceNow Elite Partner during the project or not will be affected by the way your organization works through the process. It’s important to ensure each player has the right mix of expertise, collaboration and communication skills to get the job done.
If you’d like to talk to an Elite Partner, reach out at letstalk@crossfuze.com. We’d love to chat.
