The Two Weeks That Decide Your ServiceNow Implementation Timeline
A head of IT at a 600-person industrial supplier called me after their partner's third timeline slip. The signed statement of work said twenty-two weeks to live incident, request, change, and a thin CMDB. By week nineteen, the delivery lead was asking for an eight-week extension and quoting discovery findings as the reason. His board had already approved the extension when he phoned me, so he was not asking for help negotiating. He wanted to know what he could do differently on the next phase so it did not happen again. His question is the right one, and the honest answer is that almost every ServiceNow implementation timeline is decided before the official kickoff meeting. The two weeks before the project is announced to the business are where most of the slip is manufactured, and nobody budgets for them. I say this at the risk of annoying every account executive at every system integrator. They sell a start date. Clients buy a start date. Everybody wants the kickoff slide in the second week of the quarter. What actually drives whether a project lands on time has very little to do with the kickoff and almost everything to do with the preparation that either happened or did not...
