How does this sound? “Improved visibility, control, and alignment of your ServiceNow roadmap while you improve the quality of your services and capabilities through effective governance.” This is a goal for all organizations that use ServiceNow, but how do you get there? It’s all about ensuring that “your demand management function responds to your changing business objectives.”
You can ensure that your demand management is aligned with your business objectives by conducting a phased or iterative rollout, following best practices, and appointing a demand manager. Keep reading to learn how.
Conduct a Phased or Iterative Rollout
Even when you implement ServiceNow a little at a time, employees will see the benefits and want to add functionality or add the same functionalities to their department. It may be tempting to implement ServiceNow all at once to spread those benefits around, but this “big bang” approach to implementation can be far too complex.
Significant process change and copious training at the same time can limit adoption. Instead, design a phased or iterative rollout across the organization. Ask yourself,
● “What is our change capacity?”
● “Does each department have the capacity to absorb the functionality we would implement for them?”
● “Do we have a way to capture incremental wins and thus drive adoption?”
As you take it a little at a time, you’ll increase adoption and have a better long-term experience.
Follow Proven Demand-Management Steps
According to ServiceNow,
Good demand management isn’t a matter of triage or saying “no”—it’s a way to make sure that your resources are aligned to your organization’s most important priorities and risk profile. The most successful demand management teams will foster a strategic relationship with their internal ServiceNow “customers” so they can anticipate and address their needs most effectively.
To foster this strategic relationship, make implementation a simple process that connects your organization’s business objectives with the Now Platform capabilities. ServiceNow suggests a four-step approach for demand management:
- “Create visibility by building a demand intake model.” This model should answer the “why,” “what,” “who,” and “when” questions about the investments.
- Use the data from the intake model to “take control by enhancing, prioritizing, and approving demands.”
- “Align approved demands to business outcomes.” Create a continuous feedback loop that goes from the expected business outcomes to the demand board to the ServiceNow roadmap, and back to the expected business outcomes.
- “Increase velocity and plan future demand.” Use agile practices to speed up the decision-making process.
Following these steps ensures that your ServiceNow instance is working for your organization’s specific needs.
Appoint a Demand Manager
Assign someone to own the Demand Management app. As users submit ideas from the Ideas module in Self-Service or the Service Catalog, the demand manager can see these ideas and determine the appropriate priority level and necessary action for each item. Demand managers play an important role in ensuring effective implementation and adoption of ServiceNow.
Here’s how a demand manager’s workflow typically goes:
● Look at a demand to determine whether it’s feasible, how much effort would be required, and how much it would cost.
● Create demand tasks that include the feasibility, effort, and cost estimates.
● “Assign demand tasks to a business analyst, resource user, or an appropriate group. The assigned resource or group then creates a cost and resource plan to help the demand manager assess and qualify the demand.”
For example, perhaps users in the customer service department would like a software upgrade. They submit a request, which the demand manager can then review. The demand manager can then create a demand task for the appropriate specialists to assess the cost associated with this upgrade and determine the resources that would be required. With the demand manager carefully reviewing each demand, organizations can be sure the demand for ServiceNow is in alignment with their business goals.
Ensure that your demand management is aligned with your business objectives by conducting a phased or iterative rollout, following best practices, and appointing a demand manager. Doing so will encourage successful ServiceNow implementation and long-term adoption.
