How to Pressure-Test a ServiceNow Implementation Timeline Before You Sign the SOW
A procurement lead at a German logistics company forwarded me three SOWs last week and asked which one to sign. The scopes were almost identical. ITSM, a light HRSD wave, around 800 employees, two integrations. The timelines were five months, seven months, and eleven months. The pricing roughly tracked the timeline, which is what made him nervous. He wanted to know whether the five-month vendor was a hero or a liar, and he wanted to know it before he committed his name to the contract. The honest answer is that you cannot tell from the SOW. You can only tell by pressure-testing the plan the vendor will not put on the slide. There are five questions that separate a vendor who has actually delivered a ServiceNow implementation timeline in your size segment from one who is selling you a number that exists only in a sales spreadsheet. None of them are about the platform. All of them are about the parts of the project the vendor would prefer you did not look at too closely. Every mid-market ServiceNow proposal arrives with a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart shows phases stacked on top of each other in a tidy waterfall. Discovery, design, build, test, deploy, hypercare. The phases have...
