10 Tips to Help Your Business Thrive in 2023

ServiceNow is becoming THE premiere workflow platform for the enterprise. Maximizing an organization’s investment in ServiceNow is becoming more important than ever. As a result, ServiceNow platform management is the cornerstone to driving workflow excellence for organizations around the world. Having the right expertise at the right time is required for top-notch platform management to exist. And, if you’ve been around the ServiceNow ecosystem long enough, you know it can be difficult to find the right team to make things happen. 

Let’s dive into the top 10 components needed to Thrive in 2023:

1. Build healthy product ownership

Engage your business leadership to participate in the co-ownership of the ServiceNow platform. The conduit between the business stakeholders and/or customers of your platform relies on good product ownership. Who advocates for your stakeholders/customers today? Are they continuously evolving and driving value delivered by the team? Don’t have well-defined product owners? Time to focus on that in 2023. 

2. Wrangle the intake queue

What’s worse than herding cats?! Ideas, demands, requests, enhancements, maintenance, breaks and fixes all flood the intake queue. How do you receive and manage them? Organize the inputs and filter out the noise. Define idea management. Define demand management. Stick to your guns on the processes. Drive organization of the intake queue. 

3. Tune platform governance 

Build a program and operations discipline to manage the intake queue and beyond. Once the intake queue is better managed and work is routed in the right direction, it’s time to tune governance. Establish processes that enable intake reviews, planning, steering committee, approvals, and prioritization from product and process owners, and get to work on conquering your planned and unplanned tasks. 

4. Roadmap curation

Don’t get stuck in a spaghetti junction! Build a roadmap, develop your Northstar goals, and drive! Curation of a roadmap, taking inputs from the business, aligning to your organization’s strategies, and updating the roadmap on a routine basis helps you stay on the road to success. 

5. Get agile!

Get agile and SCALE it. If your organization isn’t aligning to a scaled agile style of continuous integration and development, then it’s time to step up the game. Operations will benefit from this, too. Ensure rapid incident to defect to release to resolution all while enhancing and growing the platform capability in alignment with a well-defined implementation roadmap. 

6. Drive automation and integration

A cornerstone to value realization is automation. Drive automation in everything you design and do. Challenge the status quo when it comes to process owners and managers. Find areas where automation could reduce the time spent in a process, make others’ lives easier, and produce valuable outcomes. Integrate systems into ServiceNow-based workflows to make swivel-chair process steps a thing of the past. 

7. Proactive user experience and performance

Observe user patterns and behaviors to create novel systems that enable people to workflow SMOOTHLY! If you find yourself building robust training materials and programs to enable platform users, you’re probably doing it wrong. End users should be given intuitive interfaces that they can figure out with deep training or extensive how-to's.

8. Reduce technical debt

Unwind unnecessary customizations. Avoid them in the first place. Good systems architecture and planning will help to drive a healthy implementation that avoids the pitfalls and time-consuming efforts of managing technical debt. The Thirdera Instance Analyzer is built into all our managed services programs to help evaluate and avoid technical debt issues before they become an epidemic for your ServiceNow platform.  

9. Streamline operations 

Build intelligence into ServiceNow platform operations. Use Virtual Agent for incident and request deflection. Help users find answers on their own with a well-established Knowledgebase. Implement Machine Learning to predict the routing of workflow BEFORE it happens. Leverage Performance Analytics and Process Behavior Charts to understand how processes are working against your expectations. 

10. Upgrade...

Now! Do it! You have to! Are you on Tokyo? What’s your plan to get to Utah this spring or summer? Stay on top of upgrades. Staying current keeps your implementation fresh, full of the latest feature sets and helps to reduce the risk of technical debt mentioned in #5. Thirdera recommends a twice-a-year upgrade management program. 

It's time to Thrive

At Thirdera, we help our clients establish and mature their ServiceNow application lifecycle to enable a healthy foundation for accelerating value, growth, and cost reductions. We want to see our clients thrive by outpacing and out innovating in the application lifecycle space. Thrive Managed Services is a great way for us to help you do that. Accelerate value, grow workflow capability, increase automation, reduce costs, and THRIVE.