Summer Blockbuster

It’s summer and everyone loves beating the heat in a dark movie theater with friends and family, buttery popcorn and an ice-cold soda -- served in containers the size of small trash cans that cost as much, if not more, than the tickets you paid to enter the theater.

You may or may not be familiar with the line from the subheading, but let me explain. In one very famous summer blockbuster about the search for the Arc of the Covenant, a famous archeologist/adventurer and his local guide have discovered the location of the Well of the Souls in Egypt. This site has been buried under the sand for years in the desert and the two of them are in a race against time to locate the Arc before the bad guys get it. After they find the opening, they peer into the darkness and the sidekick says, “Why does the floor move?” The response to this is throwing a torch into the unlit cavern revealing a floor covered in snakes.

The famous archaeologist/adventurer, who, as revealed very early on in the film, is terrified of snakes, says “Snakes, why did it have to be Snakes?”

The response he gets from his sidekick is, “Asps…very dangerous. You go first.”

Now, you may be asking yourself, what in the world does this have to do with software implementations, let alone my ServiceNow implementation? The simple fact of the matter is that making a change to a new platform or enhancing your current platform can be fraught with risk. Taking that step requires a reliable partner/sidekick that will be with you every step of the way. Whether it is your current or upcoming implementation of ServiceNow, or any platform/software for that matter.

If you are a customer that is migrating to ServiceNow, you will, without a doubt, have systems that you have built up and modified over a number of years to fit your business needs/requirements. Whatever those systems are, they have had some determination on the way you are doing things today. You may have modified your business processes to meet system limitations. Over that period of time, you have had turnover and long-forgotten memories for why you do things a certain way. “This is the way we have always done it,” may be something you either hear from others or have even uttered yourself. Your needs and requirements have been buried and you need help to rediscover them.

If you are a customer that has been using ServiceNow, your concerns may be similar to those of organizations that are not using the platform, but you may have additional concerns related to customizations that you have made; customizations that impact your ability to seamlessly upgrade so that you can implement new functionality. You may have business rules and ACLs (Access Control List rules) impacting your instance(s), but you can’t recall why they were implemented in the first place. Over the years, the reasons behind your technical solutions for business or functional requirements have been forgotten or lost.

Now you have new needs or want to take advantage of new functionality but you are not 100% sure of how to get there. To get from point A to point B, it is going to take some digging to uncover the root causes of what may be causing problems on current or planned implementations.

While you may be afraid of what awaits you with legacy system replacement and/or implementing new system functionality, you need not be afraid. The Anti is here to help and light your way as a trusted partner. With the background we have here at The Anti with more than 350 implementations, we work with you over the course of your implementation so that you and your team don’t find yourself trapped in a tomb with dangerous snakes (technical debt). The team at the Anti will “go first” with you, showing you the way and advising you on best practices related to your requirements.

You will begin by working with one of our client partners and project managers (PMs) to develop the project schedule and an overall project plan, which will eventually lead us to the hidden treasure of a successful “Go Begin.” Our team works with you to “plan our dive and dive our plan,” and our PMs ensure we are hitting milestones so we do not find ourselves hanging off a cliff requiring heroic efforts to get us back on track. They light the torches for us and ensure that we don’t venture off into pits filled with snakes or quicksand.

Working with our business process consultants, you will be advised on both system functionality and proven good practices during design sessions. This is an established team that will lead you in the right direction and provide you knowledge that has been learned through experience from prior implementations so that you do not find yourself with a system that is hard for you to administer after the team has moved on to other projects. This team will dig in to understand your requirements, challenge you when necessary to help influence thoughtful decision making, and guide you in the right direction. This team will partner with you on your digital transformation journey, recommending solutions that simplify and optimize your processes.

We will translate your requirements into user stories, which will go through your approval before they are handed over to our technical team to develop. These stories serve as your basis for how you will test the functionality and ultimately verify the system configuration to ensure it is doing what you need it to do.

Our creative technical consultants will work with you to determine the best way to build your solution. They are active members of our cross-functional team who also provide top-notch consultation. They understand best practices to mitigate technical debt. We often hear them say things like “I understand you want this, but here’s why you shouldn’t do it. An alternate approach to consider is…” This is a team that has a deep understanding of what you should be on the lookout for in relation to configurations, customizations and integrations.

Our goal is to team with you across the entire span of the project so that you never find yourself saying, “How does this work?” or “Why did we build it this way?” You will be able to refer back to a host of artifacts where decisions were made. These include recorded design sessions , access to all of your user stories (with associated comments) , and requirements workbooks.

Once configuration is complete for your user stories, our team will complete a first round of unit testing to ensure everything works according to the approved acceptance criteria. Once our team has successfully completed this, we will pass it over to your team for unit testing.

When all of the user stories have successfully passed unit testing (over the course of several sprints), you will begin the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase. We provide support during this critical period to ensure any defects are corrected and everything works as expected. We understand that users provide additional input during UAT, so we also support the documentation of enhancement requests so you can prioritize and work through these after go-live as part of your continuous process improvement efforts. Once UAT is successfully completed, we continue to work with your team to migrate the development to your production environment. This is what we call “Go Begin.”

Our team will support you during this phase as well. We provide hypercare to ensure that all the services and processes that have been migrated to your production instance work properly and that what we have built together is running successfully. We are there with you in lockstep throughout the journey. There is a regular passing of the torch between our team and yours to light the path and ensure that we are avoiding pitfalls that might derail our potential success as a team.

At no point in your journey with The Anti will you ever feel you have been led into a dark cave/tomb wondering what is slithering across your shoes. We will light the torches and help guide you safely through meaningful solutions that meet your business goals.

A bit about Stephen: Stephen has over 20 years of HR and Change Management experience working for various organizations. He started his career in IT consulting doing ERP (HR) implementations and when he discovered The Anti in 2022, he knew it was something special and decided to make the move back into consulting from HR.

About The Anti: In 2017, we realized traditional HR technology consulting desperately needed an overhaul. So, we flipped the script on consulting culture.

• We grew a team with expertise in real world HR process design and technology implementation

• We aggregated and refined the best practices we’d already proven elsewhere

• We rejected traditional friction points and changed consulting culture for the better

It caught on, and we have since delivered 250+ ServiceNow HRSD engagements as the only elite ServiceNow Partner committed to the employee experience workflow products. The Anti brings a unique blend of HR Consulting experience, HR Technology backgrounds, and HR Practitioner expertise to every engagement.

Types of engagements and how we can help

We offer a comprehensive range of assistance that encompasses five key types of engagement:

• Implementation Readiness Assessments

• User & Experience Design

• Initial Implementations (Phase 1)

• Follow-on Deployments (Phase 2+)

• Advisory and Managed Services

Our mission is to meet you where you are in your ServiceNow journey to ensure your project is a success. Whether you require help with the initial setup or need guidance on optimizing your deployment, we are here to help every step of the way. With our expertise and commitment to excellence, you can be sure you are in safe hands.