How long did your company take to implement and go live with Service Catalog?

[dhoffman]

We are a new ServiceNow customer migrating away from a CA Unicenter environment (Service Desk, Service Catalog, UAPM Asset, etc.).   We went live over Summer 2015 with Incident, Problem, Change, some internal Knowledge documents, and a manual load of 30K-40K CIs and assets via an obscene amount of Excel spreadsheets and complex transform maps.   We're on Fuji.

Our next release effort is to migrate a rather large, mature Service Catalog of 800-1300 items from the CA ecosystem to our shiny new ServiceNow ecosystem.   So this is more of a migration from one tool to another instead of new construction, although there's still plenty of build effort needed.   Also mixed in with this major effort is a CMS implementation as well as a more robust Knowledge Management roll-out taking advantage of Fuji's Knowledge v3 with multiple Knowledge Bases.   We're also incorporating more Self-Service (Incident, Knowledge, and Service Catalog).   We have a main corporate HQ and several subsidiary operating companies that add some complexity as far as User Criteria and who can access what items and different processes for fulfilling similar items.

Question/Survey to all of you:   How long did your Service Catalog project take?   How many people were on your team?   How many items did you Go Live with?   How many categories?   How many workflows?   Of your workflows, how many were "crazy complicated and unique" and how many were more simple in nature and could be reused for many items?   How many of your items involved lots of client scripts and UI policies?

In other words, trying to get a feel for how other customers produced a Catalog.   "Our Catalog project took 6 months and we created 300 items."   Any and all information would be really helpful as we better communicate to project leadership as well as IT leadership of what "other" companies typically take.

Thank you!

[Uncle Rob]

Four experiences for you to consider.

6 Items in 6 months - 1 dev + 1 BA

My very first ServiceNow implementation almost a decade ago took 6 months to roll out 6 Catalog Items.   Two were generic "catch all" submit incident / request.   4 related to onboarding and included every LOB from HR to building access and factored for local differences in almost every country in the world.

150 Items in 10 months - 3 dev + 1 architect

I've been on a site where we rebuilt an old ServiceNow implementation from scratch.   In that implementation, 50 Catalog Items turned out to be a little over 150.   Took 1 year of 3 resources to roll it out in parallel with a Change Management, Light Incident Management, etc.   2/3 of the catalog items weren't IT related, were predicated on custom apps, and had inter-app tasking.

"1000+" Items in 3 months - 1 dev

At another site they spent 1 year x 2 resources building an excel sheet itemizing 1000+ "catalog items" that ended up being around 12 that pulled data from product tables.   Took 1 SN resource 3 months to redo all the BA work, build, test, revise, etc.

85 Items in 9 months - 1.5 devs

At a site now where we've spent 9 months building 85 Catalog Items.   That included time to model out several approval paradigms, and most of the Workflows feature some form of Orchestration.   That's running in parallel with a light weight Incident and Change deployment.

All that to say it REALLY depends.   You'll also have to factor for why you're switching from CA in the first place.   If the catalog wasn't satisfying the consumers in the first place, that could inflate the time.   If the your customers need faster response via orchestration, that could inflate time too

[JusCuz]

To me, probably the most important factor involved in how quickly and how well your implementation will go is involvement and organization of the process owners. Having them involved, able to give clear and detailed requirements will go far, without that involvement, your development process will be mostly taken up by hunting down and approving process and design, as well as involve too much second guessing after implementation.

I've only been involved in two implementations so far, the first was very well organized and had very tight involvement from process owners. This was up and running within just a few months and was a very smooth transition. The second was done by an outside agency. I came in after the implementation. They were up in just a few months as well, but did not have solid participation by process owners, and did not have a good understanding of what they wanted out of the tool. Months were spent afterward trying to 'clean up' the implementation.