Why Your Enterprise ServiceNow Implementation Timeline Doesn’t Scale Linearly With Scope
A CIO at a 7,000-person industrial group called me last month, two weeks before Phase 2 kickoff. The business had decided, after Phase 1 went live for IT and HR in two countries, that Phase 2 would add Logistics and Finance Shared Services across five more countries. The implementation partner had quoted an extra ten weeks. The CIO wanted a second opinion before he signed the change order. I ran the numbers with him over a ninety-minute call. Ten weeks was not wrong by a little. It was wrong by a factor of two and a half. The real additional time was between twenty-four and twenty-eight weeks, assuming nothing else changed. He signed nothing that week. This is the problem I keep running into on enterprise work. The sales math assumes a ServiceNow implementation timeline is additive. One more department, so a bit more time. One more country, so a bit more effort. In reality, enterprise ServiceNow implementation time scales nonlinearly, and the nonlinearity shows up in exactly the places that no one measures until it is too late.
