Considering Implementing ServiceNow HR Service Delivery?

We’ve met with countless prospects and customers of ServiceNow’s HRSD platform over the past couple of years, and have seen clear trends on what successful HR service delivery teams are thinking and doing to prepare for their implementations. We’ve taken the time to document these trends to encourage HR executives and their teams to use as they engage ServiceNow in conversations about the HRSD platform as a solution for their company.

TIP 1: Determine how ServiceNow HRSD supports your HR strategy

Knowing and communicating the “why” behind the project is a must. Being clear with ServiceNow, your implementation partner, and your internal stakeholders about expected qualitative and quantitative outcomes upfront will help form the business case and ground the project team on what a successful implementation looks like.

The two most common HR strategies that ServiceNow HRSD directly supports are:

1. Employee Experience (what people observe and feel when working): By providing a centralized Employee Service Center (portal) and digital services to simplify employee transactions and transitions. Phone, chat, email, self-service, and AI are all options to give the employee the service experience that they want.
2. HR Efficiency (value creation at the lowest cost): By defining a [digital] services catalog and knowledge base to form a foundation for continuous improvement and reduce HR case volume and time to resolve cases.

The outcomes derived from these strategies are typically some or all of the following:

1. Improved employee experience by way of better HR service, better communications, improved self service access to policies, process and HR tools.
2. Reduced time to resolution on HR cases
3. Improved case deflection and reduced cost to service by way of Knowledge and self served transactions
4. Infuse automation in HRSD processes to reduce the cost to service
5. Establish a continuous improvement model for HRSD technology and operating model through reporting and performance analytics

TIP 2: Define your HR catalog and determine how your HR architecture supports your catalog items

Very simply put, an HR catalog contains the items that employees use to request assistance from HR. Don’t over complicate this! For less mature HR service delivery teams, this can be as simple as offering your employees a general inquiry service by Center of Excellence and, over time, find the trends in service requests and build additional catalog items that yield the most value. For mature HRSD teams, seek the assistance of a ServiceNow HRSD consulting partner to help map your existing “case types/case queues” to an HR catalog. There is a tremendous amount of value leveraging what ServiceNow HRSD has productized. Also, having the workflow (operational tasks and steps) prepared and available to your project team will greatly accelerate the design process. We find that documenting workflows can take project teams 2-4 weeks to collect and if they do not exist.

Since ServiceNow HRSD is both a product and a platform, the possibilities to a solution are endless. Having a firm handle on what the HR Catalog items will be for your initial release, will help the team stay focused on what is important to deliver.

Once the HR catalog is defined, there is an opportunity to create integrated or automated process steps to other systems through integrations and or orchestration jobs. Knowing where these connection points are and what systems you want to integrate with early, will reduce development risk and accelerate the design process.

TIP 3: Assemble the right team

Having the right team formed for any HR or IT project is essential to success. The key roles that you will need to staff are:

1. Executive Sponsor
2. HRSD Technology Product Owner
3. HR Business Analyst
4. Subject Matter Experts
5. ServiceNow Administrator
6. Testing/QA lead

ServiceNow and most implementation partners are able to share the responsibilities of each of these roles and assist with making sure you have identified the right team members for each role.

TIP 4: Start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for release one and create a continuous development release cadence

An MVP is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development. The key phrase is “satisfy early customers.” This can be a lot of different things and stakeholders. The MVP must be derived with consideration to the business case and the desired outcomes. The early customers may have a very basic need to retire a legacy case management tool for release one. Or the business case may be predicated on adding new service catalog items. Or it could be a greenfield opportunity where general inquiries will suffice. Regardless of what the MVP is, it is important that leadership and stakeholders know the approach and are aligned.

TIP 5: Develop project timelines around compelling and/or constraining events

All projects have a start and a finish. Even projects that have a clear purpose and value can meander if there isn’t a compelling or constraining event to contain their starts and finishes. We have seen great success with anchoring ServiceNow HRSD projects around these examples of key events:

1. The opening of a newly formed HR Service Delivery Center
2. Lost of support for a legacy case management tool
3. Go live event for a new core HCM system
4. Seasonal “busy” or shutdown periods where HR and IT projects are blacked out

These are the big 5 tips to get your ServiceNow HRSD thinking started. Like most HR technology projects, there is not one simple thing you can do to make a project go smoothly. But if you build the right foundation, with the right people, working on the right things; life becomes pretty simple. Best of luck to you and your project teams! And if you happen to be at ServiceNow’s Knowledge ‘19 users conference, we will see you there!

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