How to Sequence a Multi-Module ServiceNow Implementation Timeline Without Everything Slipping
A CIO at a European medical devices group walked me through his eighteen-month plan last week. ITSM in wave one. HRSD and CMDB in parallel in wave two, four months later. SecOps and a customer portal in wave three, another six months after that. The board had already seen a Gantt chart with three neat rectangles stacked in sequence, each shorter than the one before. The programme sponsor had committed to the dates. The vendor had priced the whole thing at a discount if it landed inside the eighteen-month window. He asked me one question. Was any of it real. The honest answer is that a multi-module ServiceNow implementation timeline almost never survives contact with wave two, and the reason is not the platform. The reason is that the client organisation gets tired somewhere around month five, the vendor rotates the A-team off the account after go-live, and nobody wrote down what the interlock between waves actually costs in decision bandwidth. By the time wave two kicks off, the muscle that carried wave one is exhausted and the assumptions the plan was built on have quietly stopped being true. This post is about how to sequence a multi-year roadmap so that does not happen.
