Well, we made it halfway through one 'decisions' meeting on Monday, and then decided to instead have our implementation consultants AOS facilitate these discussions. Too many questions came up about SN's workflow functionality that I couldn't answer, so we decided we need AOS in the room facilitating the discussion to let us know what our options are and whether some ideas can be done or not in SN without customization (we're still trying to avoid any customization) and to provide recommendations based on experience at other clients. I canceled the dozen or so meetings I had scheduled, worked with AOS to plan the sessions with them leading, and scheduled about 10 hours of sessions. AOS went ahead & built hours into their SOW.
We confirmed the approach for AOS helping build our SN admin's skills. Our SN admin will help by entering some basic content like Service Catalogue items, and will have direct access to the AOS developers to assist. I also tasked her with the basic setup of 'Project lite'.
AOS presented their proposal & SOW later in the week and our company signed off on it right away (you can tell we're really excited about getting this moving!).The proposal shows an estimated 13 week project for Phase 1, with the timeline confirmed at the end of the Requirements sessions. We'll have our team do UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and will have the project in AOS's SN instance with logins for our team, who will follow the test scripts that will be documented in AOS's instance. That will be a great way to get our team started in using the product.
AOS showed me their SN instance for this project. They laid out how they have this project as a PRJ project in the Project module, and will hop over to the SDLC/Scrum module during the execution phase. Pretty cool. We think we will do a sprint every two weeks, so we need to pace UAT accordingly. We'll start identifying the UAT testers shortly, then AOS needs to make sure all the testers are able to log into our SN instance (we got single sign-on working — woohoo!), needs to get them a login into their SN instance and assign them to testing tasks in their SN instance.
Our biggest concern right now remains the timeline for standing up the new centralized Service Desk. 13 weeks isn't long enough to plan an entire new service desk structure (who should go in what position), get training material together & get the team trained on their new roles, analyze job descriptions & change job descriptions if needed, communicate the change to the organization, etc. If Phase 1 of the ServiceNow project is completed before we're ready to stand up the new Centralized Service Desk, we'll just continue on with getting Phase 2 of the ServiceNow project going.
Below is a draft timeline that we will confirm at the end of Requirements:
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