Having a ServiceNow roadmap is essential because it will help you stay focused on where you are going. A roadmap provides a vision for your ServiceNow use by reducing risks in implementations, engaging and exciting stakeholders, maximizing ROI, and eventually improving the overall experience of using ServiceNow. In today’s world of rapid change, where the pressure to respond faster becomes more insistent, it is quite easy to lose sight of your goals. Besides a technical plan, a good ServiceNow roadmap will include governance, process, and organization change management.
There are four essential steps in defining your company’s ServiceNow roadmap:
- Deciding Where You Are and Where You Are Going
First and foremost, you should start by identifying where you are, what your destination is, and the best route for transport (like with any map). In this context, it means determining who your customers are, identifying their pain factors (their challenges, initiatives, and complaints), and what functionality they’re using.
- Set and Categorize Goals
Here, we are not talking about technical goals but of business outcomes. Your team should do two things:
- Evaluate all the options available for your ServiceNow growth, and
- Come up with a unifying view of what the company will accomplish with all the new applications in place.
Describe the higher-level purposes you want to fulfill (goals) and categorize them (compliancy, value increase, or cost reduction). Categorization is necessary to help you relate goals to your company’s overarching goal. When combined with the pain factors’ relevance, these will help you with prioritizing your goals. Now you have a central strategy that will help you orient yourself on the road to achieving your goals.
- Set Tangible Objectives, Analyze, and Prioritize Them
The next step involves breaking down your overall goals into detailed, action-oriented objectives. Test each of your objectives against the SMART criteria – all your objectives need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Limited (it will significantly increase your chances of success). Before making a final selection of goals and prioritizing them, you should analyze them considering context specifics, such as product/platform (stability, etc.), process (maturity), and people (resourcing, skills, training).
Objective prioritization essentially means deciding on what to work first. To do that, you need to weigh out how much effort each initiative will take to complete against the level of business impact you’re expecting when rolling it out. A simple scoring method of low, medium, and high to decide which projects to prioritize will help.
- Define ServiceNow Roadmap
Build a roadmap by using all the information from previous steps. Include expected outcomes, risk mitigation steps, and timelines from each project. The purpose of the last step is to review each objective and formulate roadmap items that contribute to their achievement. After generating ideas through brainstorming and filtering them so only the most valuable and viable remain, you can do the final selection and prioritization of your ServiceNow roadmap items. By considering the resourcing requirements and timeframe for their realization, you will be able to identify the wins.
Without a proper roadmap, your ServiceNow integrations can stagnate, slow, or backtrack. Your company will struggle to keep up with product demand, experience problems with setting expectations with stakeholders and have development teams that are inappropriately staffed to meet demand. Most companies need a blend of maturing their existing applications and bringing in new functionalities in their ServiceNow roadmap. For help in creating an effective and viable ServiceNow roadmap, feel free to call us or ask a question on Twitter.
