The First Ninety Days After You Switch Your ServiceNow Partner Mid-Project
A programme director at a mid-cap European insurer called me at eight on a Sunday evening. Her Big 4 partner had just filed a fourth timeline slip on a fifteen-month HRSD and ITSM programme that was now approaching twenty-two months. The steering committee had voted on Friday to switch. Her question was not whether the decision was right. It was, "What do I actually do on Monday morning." That is the conversation nobody in the sales cycle prepares you for. Everyone tells you how to build the business case to switch ServiceNow partner. Almost nobody tells you what the first ninety days after the switch actually look like, or how you avoid trading one broken programme for another one. Firing the incumbent is the easy part. The next thirteen weeks decide whether the switch was worth the fight. This post is the playbook I hand to clients in the first two weeks after they make the call. It is not a marketing framework. It is what has to happen, in what order, so the platform is stable, the client team is back in control, and the new partner can actually deliver against a plan that survives contact with the instance.
