When is "sufficient" really "sufficient"? What's the Ideal Size for a ServiceNow Team?

[PeterChhu]

Hi Everyone,

I enjoyed talking with you and listening to your advice. Our organization is ready to significantly enhance the value and utility of our platform. I'm eager to learn and draw insights from the experiences of more advanced and seasoned platform owners. 

I'd like to poll the group, particularly regarding resource allocation and prioritization of ServiceNow.

If you would be willing to share:

• How large is your ServiceNow support team, and what is its organizational structure?
• Do you feel your team has the capacity to manage demand and drive innovation, or do you find yourselves consistently trying to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand waves?

Thanks!

Peter Chhu

Platform Architect

The mood

[changeman]

Hey Peter,

Excellent question, particularly in the face of the wild estimates provided by the famous ServiceNow FTE calculators. 🙂

1. We're a fairly small organization, with ServiceNow mainly serving ITSM, SPM, and IRM/VRM needs, now trying to optimize our CMDB via ITOM Discovery (no Visibility), relevant Service Graph Connectors, and CI management workflows. To manage all that, we have a 0.9 FTE CSA and 0.3 FTE CMDB/Discovery manager, though we've been told by our implementing partner we should allocate 0.75.
2. This is definitely not enough to manage demand and drive innovation, even for a small organization like ours.  We're hoping that with a somewhat optimized CMDB and basic Configuration Management workflows as the foundation for ITSM and other modules, as well as crawl/walk forays into APM and SAM/HAM, powers that be will notice all that power needs resources to manage it. 

[Felippe Mora]

We are a large organization of 165k+ employees and we have invested in implemented several modules such as SPM, HAM/SAM, Vulnerability Response, ITSM, HRSD, IRM, TPRM, and many more. 

Originally I was asking myself the same question on how large my team needed to be in order to not only implement new modules but to also provide the proper maintenance to the existing modules in production along doing maintenance in the platform to keep the performance high. Instead of looking at how much needed to be done I focused instead on standing up the Platform Governance: Technical, Demand, and Strategic. By doing so it organizes the workload in a prioritized manner which gives you a good idea how many people you need in your team to deliver the work. This also gives you clarity from Leadership on what will be bring the most value according to your Organization's visions and goals. It also sets the right expectations to Leadership on the capacity of work that your team can do and gives you the metrics needed to go and ask for additional resources if needed in order to achieve the demands of the organization.

My current team is composed of 60 developers but not all of them do new implementations. We structured the teams by modules, operations, and platform maintenance.