ServiceNow Consulting Costs: The Change Request Arithmetic That Doubles Your Budget After Signature
A procurement lead at a €1.2 billion industrial group in Lyon forwarded me a spreadsheet in October. The ServiceNow ITSM programme was ninety percent complete. The signed statement of work was €280,000 fixed-fee with a declared T&M buffer of ten percent. The current invoiced total was €442,000. Nothing in the implementation itself had failed. The platform worked. The business was happy with the configuration. The budget had not been eaten by a crisis. It had been eaten by twenty-three change requests across eight months, each one approved individually, each one defensible on its own terms, each one at a day rate thirty percent higher than the rate baked into the fixed-fee bid. Twenty-three line items. One hundred and sixty-two overrun days. A procurement team that could not point to a single conversation where someone said "no." She asked me the only question that mattered. "How does a fixed-fee contract turn into a sixty percent overrun?"
