ServiceNow Impact is a unique value acceleration solution that helps you to achieve more value faster from your ServiceNow investment. At the heart of Impact is your Value Journey, which provides a comprehensive framework for realizing value together with your Impact Squad. It lets you capture your business objectives, create an aligned ServiceNow roadmap to support these objectives, execute this roadmap quickly and successfully, and track your progress and the value that you have achieved.
To explain how your Impact Value Journey works, let’s start by looking at a different type of journey —a road trip. You’re going to pack up, jump in your car, and head somewhere exciting. And there’s good news. You’ve got a friend coming with you who’s been on hundreds of road trips, so they can really help you get the most out of your journey. So, exactly what do you need to do to have a successful road trip? You need to:
- Pick a destination, such as Miami, New York, or London.
- Get a good map and plan your route. This is where your friend can really help, since they know all the roads and can pick the fastest, safest route.
- Set up milestones. Before you start driving, you’ll need to plan your timetable. How far do you want to go on the first day, the second day, and so on?
- Get recommendations. Where are the best places to stop for gas or get something to eat? Is there anywhere you should visit along the way? This is where your friend can help again.
- Track your progress. How far have you come, and how much further before you reach your destination.
In many ways, your Impact Value Journey is just like a successful road trip, and—you guessed it— your friend is your Impact Squad. Let’s take a deeper look.
Objectives and Outcomes
This is about picking your destination. Objectives and Outcomes provides a structured way of capturing your vision and strategy—where you want to go, what you want to accomplish, and how you will measure success. This ensures that your Impact Squad is aligned with your objectives, so they can work with you to help you accomplish them. Your Impact Squad will work with you to help you create your Objectives and Outcomes, so they’ll be with you every step of the way.
Using the Objectives and Outcomes is easy. Simply pick the ServiceNow products you want to include in Objectives and Outcomes, and you’ll get a set of suggested business objectives, which you can then modify to reflect exactly what you want to achieve.
Choose a business objective that supports your vision and strategy, and you’ll get a list of business outcomes that support this strategy based on the ServiceNow products you’ve selected (you can choose multiple objectives). You’ll see a list of operational outcomes—specific, measurable results—that support your chosen business objective. Pick the operational outcomes you want to include in your Objectives and Outcomes. In the example below, we’ve chosen “Reduce Disruption from Incidents (Volume)” which is about improving employee productivity by reducing the number of incidents that affect employees. Note that all of the suggested operational outcomes are based on experience across thousands of successful ServiceNow deployments, so they are realistic and achievable.
Each operational outcome has an associated success metric, which is how you will measure the outcome. For example, the success metric for “Reduce Disruption from Incidents (Volume)” is “Number of Incidents Closed”. There is also a baseline value to measure improvements against, as well as a target for the metric. Don’t worry about setting the target right away—your Impact squad will work with you to set an achievable target based on your specific situation and their experience with previous ServiceNow deployments.
Once you’ve set up all of your business objectives and operational outcomes, you’re done. Congratulations! You now have a Value Roadmap and know exactly where you want to go.
The Capabilities Map
This is that good, accurate map we were talking about that you need to plan your Value Journey. Just like a map shows you all of the roads you could potentially take, the Capabilities Map shows you all of the ServiceNow capabilities you could potentially use to achieve your business objectives. For each of your ServiceNow products, it shows you a list of the product’ s capabilities, as well as which capabilities you’re currently using. Here’s an example below, showing the capabilities for ITSM.
The Capabilities Map automatically identifies which capabilities you’re using wherever possible by examining your ServiceNow instance. It also lets you tag capabilities that are currently being planned or implemented to give you a more complete picture of your ServiceNow deployment. You can also learn more about capabilities directly from the Capabilities Map, which is great if you want to investigate new capabilities you haven’t implemented yet. You can even tag capabilities that you never planned to use so they don’t get included in your product adoption roadmap (more about that next).
The Product Adoption Roadmap
This is about planning your route. You’ve got Objectives and Outcomes that show you your business objectives and the operational outcomes you want to achieve. You’ve also got a Capabilities Map that shows you what ServiceNow capabilities are available to you to achieve these outcomes. But how do you put the two of them together?
This is where your Impact Squad kicks into high gear. They’ll work with you to map your available ServiceNow capabilities to your targeted operational outcomes, creating a personalized Product Adoption Roadmap. This shows you the recommended implementation sequence for additional ServiceNow capabilities, providing an optimal route to achieving your business objectives. Note that your Objectives and Outcomes and the Capabilities Map are critical inputs to this process, so it’s really important that you keep these up-to-date and accurate. Also, keep in mind that you’re in control— the Product Adoption Roadmap is based on your Impact Squad’s experience and insights into your business objectives, but you’re free to accept it, reject it, or modify it.
Here’s an example of a Product Adoption Roadmap, laying out the set of recommended ServiceNow capabilities divided into Foundation, Crawl, Walk, and Run phases. It also shows the status of each capability—whether it’s being implemented, planned, or is still not in use. This is the same as the status in the Capabilities Map, which is another key reason to keep your Capabilities Map up-to-date.
Initiatives
This is all about setting your milestones. You have a Product Adoption Roadmap that recommends what capabilities to implement, and in what order, just like the route you’ve laid out for your road trip. But exactly when are you going to implement these capabilities? What is the start and end date? What’s the plan?
You can track these milestones using Impact Initiatives. This sets the timeline for your value journey, identifying exactly when you’re going to do things, and letting you track progress. Of course, you're also completely free to use your own enterprise planning tools, but Initiatives integrate planning directly into the Impact Digital Experience, giving you a single place to manage your entire Value Journey. You can also create your own Initiatives, giving you the flexibility to manage and track any activity in your Value Journey. Note that you can also track activities that accelerate your journey using Initiatives, such as Impact Accelerators.
Here’s an example of two initiatives tied to capabilities: implementing the ServiceNow CMDB and Service Mapping, and implementing the Agent Mobile App.
Recommendations
Impact recommendations are another key way that Impact accelerates your Value Journey. Remember your road trip friend who recommended great places to recharge your car, get a meal, or visit along your route? Similarly, Impact gives you personalized, AI-powered recommendations for Impact Accelerators that will make your journey faster, safer, and more successful. Accelerators are fixed-scope services engagements that address specific focus areas—for example, the Jumpstart Your CMDB accelerator will help you start implementing your CMDB. There are dozens of accelerators available, including architecture, strategy, and technical accelerators. Impact recommendations show you which are right for your organization, and when.
Impact also automatically creates an initiative when you start an accelerator, integrating it directly into your overall plan.
Tracking your progress
Your Value Journey sets you on the road to success, but unless you can measure that success, you don’t know how far you’ve gone or how far you still have to go. That's why value reporting is integrated directly into your Value Journey. Your Impact Squad will give you regular updates on how you’re progressing compared to the targets you’ve set, and will also give you reports on the value that you’ve achieved. This includes:
- Quarterly Operational Performance Reviews, where your Impact Squad will show you how your operational success metrics are performing compared to your original baselines and targets, including identifying key trends and providing recommendations on how you can accelerate your journey even more.
- Annual Value Reports, which show you the monetary value of the improvements you’ve made in the year, broken down by the operational outcomes you identified in your Objectives and Outcomes. This is also a great time to discuss how to further optimize and extend your Objectives and Outcomes with your Impact Squad, or to adjust your Objectives and Outcomes to reflect changing priorities in your business.
Let’s recap
Your Value Journey is a critical part of ServiceNow Impact, helping you to work together with your Impact Squad to achieve more value faster. By helping you crystallize your business objectives, create an aligned ServiceNow roadmap, execute that roadmap quickly and successfully, and measure the results that you’ve achieved, it gives you a complete framework to maximize the value of your ServiceNow investment, delivering the best results for your organization.
