Internal ServiceNow Center of Excellence and Innovation

[PlatformPadawan]

Hi all,

I'm curious to know what you're all doing if you have a concept of a ServiceNow Center of Excellence within your organization. How is yours structured, what has worked and what needed tweaking? We're looking into doing something like a COEI in our org and we have the roles but curious to know how others are finding success in this area.

Thanks in advance

[Aly Skidmore1]

Hi there.  What scale is your CoE?  I think there'll be plenty of POs on here with a wide range of experiences that we can share but it might be easier to identify someone who can help who has set up something along the same shape and size of what you are trying to achieve.  They range enormously, from 2 people to over 100. 

My general advice would be to start with the blueprint but don't be wedded to it.  Evolve using your instincts, the needs of your stakeholders and the capabilities of your team.  Prioritise governance into your risk areas, don't drown in it and always always always create space for team work, creativity and problem solving.  

[PlatformPadawan]

Thanks for the reply Aly, I appreciate your input around being flexible to the overall plan.

We're looking at around ~15-20 committee leaders and ~100+ end users we serve. We have an understanding and game plan around roles/responsibilities for leaders and committee members. We also have an idea around how to structure the prioritization of roadmaps and other topics to bring to the CoE.

I'm still interested in hearing how others have modeled theirs, how they handle governance/process and ultimately what has worked or not worked in their orgs.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @PlatformPadawan 

Greetings!!

We have a small CoE team of ServiceNow. it consist of 40 resources as of now, combination of BPC/ Dev / QA and Architect. The purpose of the CoE is mainly to keep an eye on new features and upgrades and test it with most commonly used apps. Also this team help us in customization as well.  The goverance, as it is small team so goverance process is not mature, if we get any specific use case from client then we discuss with this team.

[PlatformPadawan]

Atul,

I appreciate the reply and insight into your CoE, it helps with affirming we're on the right track. We're re-starting ours and wanted to make sure we're doing it better than last time and mindful of the approach. I'm defining the roles and governance process to begin with, next we'll identify a few quick wins items to get momentum and excitement early. 

I'm encouraged to hear a few others have the same concept and are on the same path. Thanks again