How to drive Organizational Adoption for ServiceNow
IT TransformationBlog Post

How to drive Organizational Adoption for ServiceNow

How to drive Organizational Adoption for ServiceNow


Do you know the most common reason behind failure of transformation initiatives? It’s not the substandard tech solution or a lack of talent. Poor adoption is often why they fail. If employees, the real end-users, fall back into old ways of working after a transformation initiative, there is effectively no business value created. They seem reluctant to accept changes in how things work. This calls for reconsidering the entire approach to drive adoption and manage change.

"Organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources."

Henry Mintzberg, Author on Business and Management

Traditionally, organizations foster change from the top, dictating how things will work to the organization. But treating employees as yet another resource no longer works in the age of the customer. If you expect your employees to gain interest in the new procedures, you must involve them in the process. Every employee is a change agent. By tapping into employees’ combined capabilities, you can capture full value from your transformation initiatives.

And when your initiative is a service delivery model with ServiceNow, your organization needs to reorient to a service mindset and embrace change. You must leverage the community of human beings that your organization truly is, actively lead and plan adoption to drive organizational change at scale successfully.

Following are four indispensable components to overcome employee reluctance in accepting a services mindset in an organization:

  • Create what employees need
  • Build confidence in the new approach
  • Prepare employees for change
  • Communicate vision through employees

This blog will help you explore these four components to drive organizational adoption and continuous change management for ServiceNow.

Create what employees need

For better adoption and engagement, you have to ensure that you implement what your employees actually need. Work with the end users to understand their service consumption point of view, and configure your service delivery model in a way they need.

This way, you’ve ensured that the service experience aligns with your user’s expectations and needs. Moreover, this enables you to continually track how successful the implementation has been in meeting those needs.

Here is how you can define and optimize service experience:

  • Create user experience standards to ensure that the selected tools are used. Keep the employees’ primary tasks easily accessible.
  • Recognize adoption roadblocks such as different lines of reporting, and plan to remediate them through training and clear communication via chosen team members.
  • Apply human-centered design thinking to incorporate feedback from all groups that are going to using the service. Although, mapping user experience won’t resolve all of their issues.
  • Assess service experience factors when you prioritize enhancements to ServiceNow configuration. Make tradeoffs to stick with the key business values expected from the ServiceNow platform.
  • Track user experience metrics to monitor employee satisfaction the way you monitor your customers’ satisfaction. Link these metrics with service experience metrics to focus on outcomes.
  • Continually track service investment to realize the ROI in terms of your ease of doing business. Focus your investments to first resolve abandonment, then to reduce effort, and lastly to delight your users.

Build Confidence in the New Approach

Even if your ServiceNow implementation is addressing the right user needs, your employees might not adopt if they don’t feel confident. This confidence can only come with proper training and skill development. Training shouldn’t be thought of as an immediate solution as that can leave your employees with pockets of knowledge that are static. Your organization must invest in holistic training.

According to ServiceNow, a robust training program should use certifications to help employees keep abreast of ServiceNow innovation. Further, the program should encourage employees to go beyond technical and process competencies taking a services view of value delivery.

Here is how you can build effective support, training, skill and development:

  • Identify the people in your organization who will need ServiceNow training and use certification to ensure that they have understood the required products. Begin with generating awareness as you go on to train for one process at a time.
  • Create and integrate initial training material to help your employees understand how the ServiceNow implementation will change their processes and workflow. Improve engagement with the material through videos, quizzes, social media and gamification.
  • Train service owners to develop their organizational awareness, communication, and influencing skills. They need to ensure constant managerial support as the staff tries out new ways of working in the organization.
  • Ensure training is effectively resourced, and involves the services ecosystem. Engaging all of the organization around service concepts, training should be a key component throughout the program lifecycle. Practice both internal and external training to engage your employees.
  • Take training beyond the classroom to resolve issues in applying knowledge. Non-classroom training activities can expand the knowledge base and practical skills of employees, motivating self-structured training in your organization.
  • Integrate service management training with enterprise training roadmaps for transformation. This also helps your team build capabilities that are more than just functional activities.
  • Ensure that new approaches are being used in daily workflow. The service staff should be comfortable with new ways of working, and managers should be there for support and coaching responsibilities.
  • Meet changing demands in the services journey by actively ensuring that the training is up to date with any new development needs.

Prepare employees for change

With user-centered design and effective training, you have ensured that employees have both the desire and confidence for using ServiceNow. However, the entire organization goes through a lot of change as it implements a service management mindset. And this change can’t happen from the top down.

As you transition to a services-led organization, it’s imperative that all groups of employees engage at all levels to understand the changes that are happening, particularly to their parts of the organization. Even while recognizing which teams are going to be influenced the most, you must prepare for the change in your entire organization.

Here is how you can develop effective organizational change management:

  • Create ServiceNow impact assessments for all major software implementations so that immediate returns can be ensured by keeping initial changes simple. Involve target populations, and gauge their emotional response to the proposed changes.
  • Identify key employees who must be ready for the change for a successful deployment of ServiceNow. Ensure that these employees are prepared for the services-led transformation and they don’t fall back into the old ways of working.
  • Push customized communication to different target groups whose roles and responsibilities are going to be impacted by the changes to come.
  • Extend communication about change to consumers so they understand what it means for their service experience and interactions. Focus the communication on how it helps make the user experience more engaging, effective, or straightforward.
  • Assess change effectiveness against business value realization targets. Use effective communication to build understanding of the rationale behind the change and that business outcomes are important to achieve.
  • Connect change management with service value realization. While choosing to develop or retire different service functionalities, consider change impact. Further, as you prioritize service investments, you should also take into account change effort.
  • Assess how much change the impacted groups are already undergoing so that you can sequence change along with other departments , allowing staff time to absorb and assimilate to the changes.
  • Reassess change readiness to ensure the change has positive ROI. Assess what value previous change processes have delivered and consult their posture based on what has already worked.

Communicate Vision through Employees

With an effective change management plan in place, your employees should know what to expect. In reality, what’s communicated to employees is often limited, based on their role, as organizations operate in silos. This top-down way of communication isn’t effective enough in giving a holistic understanding of how to work in the new services model.

If you enable some employees to become adoption champions from different impacted groups, you can propagate the new services mindset easily. These adoption champions will help you share best practices, and replicate success stories. Using their connections inside and outside the organization, they will help their groups to resolve issues during change.

Here is how you can enable adoption champions:

  • Select adoption champions to act as the connection between vendors, IT and the end-users. Start picking potential candidates from employees who are excited about the new approach, and are eager to adopt.
  • Define the adoption champion rule so that they know whose interests they are championing and what they are empowered to do. An adoption champion should fully understand the vision for the processes they are working with.
  • Provide resources and training for adoption champions so that they are empowered with the knowledge they need to effectively communicate the overall vision of the program.
  • Build adoption champion community to encourage knowledge sharing among themselves, and with vendors and external partners. Foster use of social platforms in the organization to communicate.

It takes a village

In the explored action plans for the four components, you use small nudges instead of pushes to drive adoption. No change can bring efficiency if it’s just pushed from the top. With nudges from employees to employees such as those from adoption champions, the community of your employees acts as a catalyst for your services-led transformation initiative, and the likelihood of you meeting your business objectives increases 6 fold.

As a ServiceNow Elite Partner, INRY works closely with organizations to help them not only implement but also adopt the services mindset. We take the time to understand your organization’s workflows and the needs of your employees. Leveraging our experience with some of the industry leaders, we choose the most efficient route to drive adoption to create immediate business value in your organization.

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