Why a Boutique ServiceNow Consulting Partner Beats a Big 4 on Mid-Market Implementations
A finance director at a 400-person manufacturer called me on a Thursday afternoon in February. They were eleven months into a ServiceNow ITSM and HRSD program with one of the Big 4. The original promise was nine months. The original budget was 1.4 million euros. They were now at 1.9 million, and the partner had just submitted a change request for another 380,000 to "stabilise the ITSM go-live." The actual platform? Half of HRSD was not built. The CMDB was a graveyard of duplicate CIs. Three of the original five named consultants had rotated off to a bigger account in Q4. The two who remained were a junior who had finished his ServiceNow Fundamentals two months earlier and a manager who came on calls but did not touch the platform. She was not angry. She was tired. She wanted to know if her board was going to look stupid for picking the safe name on the slipsheet. This is the conversation I have most often now. Not "should we use ServiceNow." That decision is usually two years old by the time we talk. The question that comes up again and again is whether a boutique ServiceNow consulting partner is genuinely a better fit for a mid-market company than one of the global integrators....
