It’s been said there are two things that will ruin a deployment: moving too quickly or moving too slowly. Fortunately, ServiceNow and our partners invest a lot to make sure you strike the right balance when implementing our HR Service Delivery suite of offerings. Below are tips to empower your successful go-live, make sure won’t move too slowly, and accelerate your value realization.
Why Move Quickly?
Your leadership just made a major investment to improve your HR Service Delivery and your employee experience. You want to go-live as quickly as possible to earn the return on your investment and gain their respect. Going live quickly, and doing it well, will gain you credibility with your leaders and make it easy for you to justify further investments as you strive to continuously improve. Your initial go-live is not your grand finale. This will be a journey. Establish your vision, begin with what you believe will be most successful, and create a great initial impact.
Built by HR for HR
ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery offerings are purpose-built for HR by HR. Our dedicated team of HR professionals has over 2000 years of collective experience. With more than 500 live customers using these products, we’ve incorporated a lot of practical feedback through our Customer Product Advisory Council (PAC), comprised of HR leaders and practitioners. Our Product Management team also conducts regular check-ups to understand ways in which our products can better meet the needs of our customers. Here are just a few of the ways in which the products are designed for fast deployments.
- More than 50 ‘out-of-the-cloud’ HR Services, organized into fourteen (14) HR Centers of Excellence (COE’s) to present to your employees
- Nine (9) persona-based dashboards, more than 20 HR specific reports, more than 30 key performance indicators (KPI’s), plus surveys and scorecards to get your HR organization a head start on the race to world class service
- A Guided Setup embedded within the product to help you execute your deployment plan
- Pre-built integrations to the most common HCM and technology partners
- Predefined roles and security rules designed to keep sensitive employee information confidential
- Prebuilt widgets and mobile responsive design on the Employee Service Center to facilitate employee engagement and targeted communications
- A framework within Enterprise Onboarding & Transitions to rapidly configure lifecycle events with reusable components
- Employee Experience Packs to facilitate delightful experiences for many moments that matter, such as parental leave, tax season, onboarding, transfers, etc...
Preparation
What should you do to prepare yourself?
- Establish a vision for the project. Then align your core team to that vision. What are you seeking to achieve? What are your key outcomes and guiding principles (3 - 5 max)?
- Train key individuals prior to the kick-off. This will allow them to augment the delivery team and gain real-world experience. ServiceNow offers several HR Learning Paths.
- Develop a creative and culturally inclusive change management and communications plan to promote your new employee services paradigm.
- Involve your target audience (your employees) as much as possible in your implementation strategy.
- Design your strategy with your employees as the focus; not your own teams.
- Define the roles and responsibilities of your project team, not only for the implementation but also for the governance and continuous improvement that comes afterward.
Adopt an Agile project management cadence. This means you’ll schedule smaller, more frequent phased roll-outs. This allows you to expose the value of the platform more quickly and helps avoid scope creep. ServiceNow professional services (PS) and our certified implementation partners are well versed in this methodology and will train you on the concept if you are not already familiar with it.
Execution
ServiceNow Professional Services offers standard implementation packages and many partners do as well. These repeatable offerings are based on years of experience and hundreds of deployments. These standard offerings come with specified time frames of 12, 16, 20, or 24 weeks depending upon how much you wish to configure in phase one. Select partners also offer accelerators for your first-phase to help you get up and running amazingly quickly.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, so take the time to learn what your employees and your agents want the most. Involve them in the design process. However, never try to boil the ocean. Start with your most common inquires and requests. Start with your 3-5 most common languages. You’ll gain valuable feedback and insight after your first phase to help you shape subsequent phases to better serve your employees. It’s been said that a good implementation never ends. That’s true. ServiceNow is easy to configure and upgrade, so plan to innovate and improve frequently over time. You don’t have to do it all at once.
Restructuring and Optimizing Your HR Services Organization
As part of their overall transformation, many HR leaders seek business advice and strategy design before they even begin to think about their technical implementation project plan. Not to fear. ServiceNow has partners who specialize in HR Transformation services. These are traditional, well known HR consultancy firms that guide you through the changes you wish to make and help you avoid the pitfall of “analysis paralysis.”
You Are Not Alone
ServiceNow has a vibrant community of HR customers eager to share common practices that have worked well. Tap into that network by joining the community online and by attending regular events in your city to share ideas.
If you would like more information, please contact your ServiceNow sales representative or visit ServiceNow HR Service Delivery to learn more.
