What's in this Success Playbook

ServiceNow^® implementations shouldn’tbe a matter of “lifting and shifting” existing work processes into your instance. Instead, look at your implementation as an opportunity to analyze and improve how work gets done in your organization so you can realize your vision and objectives for transformation.

You can modify your processes—the series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular outcome—by optimizing the process, getting rid of waste, and adding automation. Sometimes, you can even eliminate processes to achieve business objectives.

Without a systematic approach, you can risk making processes overly confusing and complex, which could limit your organization’sadoption of ServiceNow. Continual process improvement with a focus on automation improves the organization’s ability to build processes in ServiceNow that develop agility and responsiveness.

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

• Redesigning work processes entails more than selecting and using a process framework. These frameworks sometimes miss that you must bring a lot of people on the journey. Work toward building a culture of using processes not as an end in themselves, but to make work better for people.
• Consider ServiceNow out-of-the-box (OOTB) processes as a method to accelerate change and maintain a straightforward upgrade path.

The payoff of getting this right

When you build a culture of continuous process improvement—one that liberates everyone in the organization to reimagine how work gets done—you not only increase process efficiency and effectiveness, but you create a culture in which everyone is a stakeholder in building better, simpler work experiences.

Steps covered

Step 1: Assess your existing processes

• You can’t overestimate the importance of first-hand experience in documenting current processes.
• The point is not to create the perfect as-is document—it’s to get all parties in the same room to get consensus on what’s currently happening.
• Certification in frameworks like ITIL and Six Sigma shouldn’t be the sole criterion for identifying process owners. The best process owners are skilled in influence and collaboration, so they can promote (rather than police) a companywide culture of process improvement.

Step 2: Identify process improvement opportunities

• When creating to-be processes, consider how they align with business objectives, dependencies with other processes, and adoption.
• Even if OOTB ServiceNow processes aren’t a 100% match to your desired to-be processes, you may get to your next level of maturity faster by going OOTB.

Step 3: Design process improvements

• Make sure you do a formal design walk for each solution design.
• Consider adopting OOTB ServiceNow processes if they cover a majority of high-priority use cases.

Step 4: Plan future process improvement opportunities

• After you implement quick wins, prioritize your process improvement steps through a business value lens.

Step 5: Develop a system to continually identify process improvement opportunities

• Stay focused on how process improvement creates business value.

Step 6: Build a process improvement culture

• A culture of process improvement must extend well beyond the process owner role.