What Boutique ServiceNow Consulting Settles in a Two-Hour Scoping Call That Takes a Big 4 Six Weeks
A head of IT at a 600-person logistics firm sent me a scoping document last month. Forty-one pages. It had been produced by one of the Big 4 after what they called a "discovery and assessment engagement." Six weeks, three onsite workshops, nineteen stakeholder interviews, a kickoff deck, an interim readout, a final readout, and a signed statement of work for the next phase. The invoice for the discovery was €84,000. He asked me to look at it before he signed the implementation SOW. I read the whole thing on a Sunday afternoon. The actual content, once you stripped out the appendices, the methodology slides, the "future state vision," the governance structure diagrams, and the eleven-page stakeholder RACI, fit on about two pages of substance. His current ITSM instance was over-customized. He needed a rebuild of incident, problem, and change on a cleaner data model, with a reasonable integration to his monitoring tool and a sane service catalog for his internal users. That was it. I called him back on the Monday. We spent two hours on the phone. By the end of that call I had a scoped build plan, a sequencing recommendation, a rough cost band, and a shortlist of the three technical...
