So, your company is taking the leap and rolling out ServiceNow enterprise-wide, maybe for the first time ever, or maybe just to introduce a new product line or application. Excitement is growing and the buzz is building -- people want to know more! Your boss has put you in charge of the organizational change management (OCM) workstream, where you’ll plan and deliver everything related to technical skills and user adoption. And while you’re a skilled change practitioner or project manager, you’ve never been part of a ServiceNow implementation for these products before. Where do you even start? Help!
Ultimately, you’ll be creating a detailed training and communication plan for all the impacted users at your organization. So, your critical first is to gather information about what these stakeholders do today, and how that job will be changing. Work closely with your implementation team here, as you may be able to sit in on business process workshops to gather these datapoints. You can also connect with the team who was part of the sales cycle, as they are likely to have critical metrics around what pain points your organization is trying to solve with ServiceNow. Surveys, particularly anonymous surveys, can help pinpoint people’s excitement and fears around the upcoming change.
Once you understand all the impacted groups within your organization, you’ll want to understand what skills they’ll need to do their job successfully and to make the ServiceNow program a success at your organization. After seven years at ServiceNow working with hundreds of customers, I consistently see a few main groups that emerge:
The individuals within these groups will vary. For example, within the process user bucket, you may have both Tier 1 support, who will be creating and routing cases, as well as Tier 3 specialists, who will be leveraging a wide range of reporting to resolve cases. So, while the training content may vary, the training approach for this group would be more similar than the approach for Developers, or your Service Portal customers, for example. Let’s take a look at the recommended training approach for each group:
An important observation here is that typically, the largest stakeholder populations (in this case, the end users) require the smallest training investment, in terms of training material and time. The smallest group (in this case, technical users like Developers and Administrators), will require the most in-depth training. The same doesn’t necessarily apply to your communications strategy, however. While a System Administrator may need more technical hands-on platform knowledge than a Service Desk Agent, for example, they both have an equal need to understand the change story and feel confident in how and why their job will change.
In this blog, I’ve given you the 30,000-foot view of managing change for a ServiceNow implementation. But as change practitioners, and as people who have experienced changes ourselves, we know that success is determined at an individual level. From the seat of the plane flying high above, everything below blends together into a static, flat picture. But from the ground, you see the rich topography and teeming activity. For your own change, you can start with the groups outlined in this blog, but you’ll want to build champions within each group that can foster change from the ground up.
For more resources on building a ServiceNow team of experts, visit our Customer Success Center, or learn more about platform team roles and responsibilities here.
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The Ask a Training Expert blog is published monthly by members of the ServiceNow Training Solution Consulting team. For more information about ServiceNow Training and Certification, visit our website. Please comment on this article to see your question featured in upcoming blogs.
