Transformation of Professional Services

[john_roberts]

I started my ServiceNow career soon after the first annual User Conference in 2007. Back when the entire conference could fit into the Western Metal Supply suite for a Padres game. My first role with the company was to be part of the new Professional Service team to assist customers in implementations. We had a team of 3 people. Before that time, "services" was when the pre-sales consultants assisted customers for a couple of days after the sale closed. This model worked for a while as a large part of the new customer base didn't need much more assistance than customizing a few forms, and the few large customers of the time received plenty of attention from development resources. We were also going through the learning process of how to design implementation statements of work around all of the various customizations that a customer could ask for. This was especially true when we introduce Service Catalog.

Since we we're growing the team so fast, I lost track of how large the Professional Service team became before I moved into a development role two years later but it was big enough where I no longer knew everyone in the department. As the customer size continued to grow so did the need for more implementation/deployment resources and longer term engagements. The projects were also large enough that most required oversight. Introduction of the Engagement Manager role allowed the consultants to focus on building customizations and preparing the handoff to the customer admin teams. The Engagement Manager focused on customer relationship, requirements gathering, and scope management.

Jump forward another couple of years where Tuesday, ServiceNow made a couple of announcements at Knowledge12 regarding Professional Services.

First, the Professional Service organization is leveraging the experience gained over the many years of customer implementations to provide accelerated time-to-value project methodologies and project task management. What better way to manage the planning process and work involved in a service engagement than leverage the process and task-based features that already exist in the platform. This new package of standards and management methods is referred to as StartNow.
The second announcement was about the new partnership with KPMG. KPMG will play a key part in helping scale professional services for enterprise class customers.

See announcements for more information.