How Are You Structuring Your ServiceNow Teams? Insights Wanted!

[BBH-MattWollman]

Good morning, ServiceNow Community!

I’m conducting research on how organizations are actually staffing and managing their ServiceNow platforms, and I’d love to hear your insights.

I’ve managed ServiceNow implementations at five companies since 2012. In each case, there was a centralized ServiceNow team responsible for administration, development, and operations. Individual cost centers—like HR or Facilities—did not have embedded ServiceNow resources.

However, ServiceNow’s guidance now emphasizes a hybrid model: a centralized platform team paired with embedded analysts, admins, or even developers in business units.

I’m curious to know what’s happening on the ground. Specifically:

• How common is the centralized model versus a decentralized or hybrid model in your organization?
• Are these models working effectively?
• Would you stick with your current model or change it if you could?
• What lessons have you learned—good or bad—from your chosen approach?

All perspectives are welcome—whether you’re in IT, HR, Facilities, Security, or beyond. I appreciate any input you’re willing to share. Let’s learn from each other!

Thanks in advance,

Matthew Wollman

[TamaraT]

I am also curious regarding this. My organization is very new to ServiceNow, we go live with ITSM next month.  My team needs to grow, and we bring on more modules. 

Tamara DeGraff

Indiana Office of Technology

[Paul Ciarfella]

I am a three-time ServiceNow customer.  I have been restricted to having a minimal staff, where I had no more than five people including myself.  We have always worn 'multiple hats' but had some specialization.  So for example, we all had good dev and admin skills, but one person was the go-to ITOM SME, and another would be the portal SME.  In my experience, the high cost of SN would ironically lead to a small team staffing budget - the "We're already paying $X million for it and now you want a staff of 10 people?".

My preference is to staff it like a product team:

At least one architect

At least one admin for day/day BAU support

A BA familiar with each process area, like ITSM

At least one hands-on SME for each functional area, where specialized skills are required.  For example, I would staff my ITOM group with former sys admins that understand the underlying technology they are monitoring and discovering, especially with cloud.  Or my front-end portal person would have strong UIUX experience.

At least one quality person

And a tech writer/docs person that can create and delivery training material

[lesmayhead67282]

So its an interesting question and I guess different organisations will have different staff profiles based on different range of sizes and SN complexity

In my last environment as context we had approximately

165K external users (via a CSM portal)

4K internal users - ITSM portal

120 fulfillers - levels 1 -3

about 10K cases per month

5K servers in CMDB (total assets 300K)

4 DC 

and the following products

and the team was structured like this 

With the team like this we could cover early UK hours to late UK - about 20:00

We also had a knowledge and reporting person that was outside my team but 100% aligned.

Hope this all helps

[Paul Ciarfella]

How well did that work?  It looks like the right sizing to me, or what I would dream to have for a similar size.