What's in this Success Playbook

This Success Playbook will teach you the process of finding and managing a partner who will help you capture the full value from ServiceNow^®. You’ll learn: 

• To define and establish a partner strategy that’s aligned to your business objectives
• To identify the insights you need to search for, evaluate, and select a certified partner
• The necessity of coordinating, measuring, and managing your partner
• To determine how a strategic partner can help you identify transformation and innovation opportunities beyond your initial business outcomes

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

Your choice of an implementation partner is just as important as your choice to use ServiceNow, but many organizations don’t put enough effort into properly vetting partner quality during the selection process. Finding and selecting the right partner is critical—and getting out of a bad partner selection can be time consuming and costly.

The payoff of getting this right

You’ll have a partner who delivered a successful ServiceNow implementation that resulted in achieving all or part of your organization’s vision for transformation and desired business outcomes. Your initial ServiceNow implementation may be the start of a long-term, strategic relationship.

Steps covered

Step 1: Define and establish a partner strategy

• Don’t just define partner requirements at a tactical level—a comprehensive partner strategy includes requirements that reflect your transformation vision and desired business outcomes.
• Tap into the expertise of key stakeholders early. Include cross-functional expertise in your partner evaluation team.
• Ask for project management resources to steer the partner evaluation and selection process.

Step 2: Search for prospective partners

• Don’t rely on a single or limited source for identifying prospective partners. Instead use multiple channels to build a comprehensive, targeted list that matches your partner strategy.

Step 3: Evaluate prospective partners

• Create a master list of questions to interview prospective partners and determine if you have a candidate that matches your partner strategy.
• Use anecdotal data as well as quantitative measurements when determining a partner’s cultural fit and ability to address your business needs.
• Identify signals from partner stories that will help provide evidence of a potentially strong, collaborative relationship.

Step 4: Select and onboard your partner    

• When you create an onboarding plan for your new partner, collaborate so your partner understands what should be included based on prior experience.

Step 5: Manage your partner    

• Start measuring your partner’s performance immediately to ensure early problems don’t lead to long-term failure.
• Include your partner in strategy governance to ensure they’re delivering toward your vision for transformation.
• Assign a strong manager to the partner relationship. Set clear expectations for this role and for how you’ll manage partner performance.

Step 6: Develop a strategic partner relationship    

• Be a “customer of choice” to get expanded value out of the partner.
• Provide access to the insights and resources your partner needs to deliver transformational value.
• Don’t judge a partner by size or cost, but by how invested they are in your success.