CASE STUDY

Ready to quit ServiceNow

One such retailer launched ServiceNow through a different engagement partner in 2016. After some leadership changes and the exit of the entire internal ServiceNow team, a systems administrator took ownership of the ServiceNow platform within the organisation. He instantly knew that he had his hands full. Many people in the organisation felt the platform needed a lot of babysitting.

When department leaders requested IT support to use the platform to satisfy a specific need, IT would turn to their ServiceNow partner to scope out that need and outline a cost. The process was lengthy and cumbersome. By the time it was complete, and IT wrapped back around to the requestor, they already developed a workaround without IT support.

Additionally, the partner had poor communication and their project price tag was frequently too rich for the company’s budget. With slow project response time and pricing barriers, ServiceNow crept to the top of the list of technology slated to be cut. IT didn’t feel they were getting value from the platform and expansion into other areas of the business was slow and somewhat painful.

If they were to continue to use ServiceNow, IT needed to be faster at responding to requests, able to tie the business’s need to the capabilities of the platform, and in turn, articulate the information back to each business unit so that they understood and had buy-in. The key to making this work and reinstating a positive image of IT was to have a capable and reliable partner ready to turn needs into action.

A New Team and a New Way of Thinking

During this low point in the relationship with their original ServiceNow partner, the system administrator got an email—out of the blue—from Nick McGillivray at Crossfuze. He felt there was value in what Nick offered. The team engaged Crossfuze to do a Health Check and assessment of the state of their ServiceNow instance.

Meanwhile, the system admin set up a suite of communications, internal documentation, and workshops to see how the platform was working for the various department heads. In those meetings, he realised that people asked for things in ServiceNow but, those things weren’t getting delivered.

The team expanded the Health Check to include department heads. Crossfuze held a series of meetings to discuss how ServiceNow could consolidate and integrate legacy systems and how that would streamline workflows to improve employee productivity. These conversations went deep into the organisation and engaged people who weren’t yet using ServiceNow to identify how the platform could be helpful in their work. Together, Crossfuze and the internal team developed a strategic roadmap for ServiceNow moving forward. And the conversations revealed something else about the Crossfuze team.

These highly skilled developers had the soft skills necessary to explain ServiceNow to end-users. This communication helped facilitate strategic meetings that eventually proved pivotal to how the company uses the platform today.

Additionally, the system administrator appreciates that the Crossfuze developers have taken the time to understand him as a person along with the business. They share his vision for ServiceNow. They’re deeply familiar with the core business and the retail landscape overall. Crossfuze moves quickly on projects, but they also know the ServiceNow platform well enough to be able to tell developers when to put on the brakes—without friction.

The ongoing partnership with Crossfuze helps the organisation see the big picture. ServiceNow went from being viewed as a “forgotten about IT tool” to a business driver. Today, the platform is every bit as important as the employees who work for the organisation.

Now when business units and leadership discuss efficiencies, IT and ServiceNow are an essential part of those conversations. Department heads, including the CIO, come to IT to see if the solution lies in ServiceNow—either as a custom app or one of the already licensed applications.

Not Just a Platform, a Partnership

Crossfuze demonstrated a deep interest in the customer’s ideas for the platform from the very beginning of their relationship. The Crossfuze team focused on integrating as deeply as possible into the account so that they could understand the enterprise’s inner workings, beginning with IT. In doing so, the team was able to quickly provide creative approaches to solving business challenges while keeping an eye on what’s to come on the horizon for opportunities.

As the partnership with Crossfuze has grown, the company finds ServiceNow projects routinely come in under budget and much faster than expected. The image of IT has changed for the better—to one of a team that helps other areas of the business achieve success by applying creative approaches to overcoming challenges and identifying areas of opportunity. Today, requests continually flow into IT for leveraging the platform. The more workflows done on the ServiceNow platform, the more IT and other users learn about what the platform can do.

Crossfuze takes an already valuable, out-of-the-box, product and adds app customisations to help run the business. The partnership makes ServiceNow a more user-friendly tool for enabling IT to contribute to the company’s strategic goals across three countries on two continents. Now, IT gets positive feedback on the platform and their effectiveness in working with the business.