1. Reimagine how you want work processes to flow
Success Pillar: Actively lead the transformation

2. Success Pillars – Structure
State and measure your business goals
Actively lead the transformation
Get your ServiceNow foundations right
Create excitement, drive adoption 1
State your transformation vision and outcomes 1
Engage executive sponsor to drive change and remove roadblocks 1
Manage to
“Out-of-the Box” 1
Design an engaging self-service employee & customer experience 2
Build your business case 2
Find, manage, and coordinate capable, certified partners 2
Discover and map your service assets 2
Design an optimal agent and rep experience 3
Build a phased
program plan, identify quick win 3
Build dedicated, dynamic governance process, policies & team 3
Plan your architecture, instances, integrations and data flows 3
Create change management plan 4
Baseline and track performance, usage KPIs and metrics 4
Reimagine how you want work processes to flow 4
Plan for upgrades at least once a year 4
Build an internal team of ServiceNow experts & train users 5
Define and map out your business services 5
Build a community of champions 6
Manage platform demand

3. Reimagine how you want work processes to flow
ServiceNow implementations should not be a matter of ‘lifting and shifting’ existing work processes into your instance. Instead, your implementation should be seen as an opportunity to analyze and improve how work gets done in your organization to realize your vision and objectives for transformation. Processes (the series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular outcome) can be modified by optimizing the process, getting rid of waste, and automation. Sometimes processes can even be eliminated to achieve business objectives.
Without a systematic approach, you can risk making processes overly confusing and complex, potentially risking effective adoption of the Now Platform. Continual process improvement, with a focus on automation, improves the organization’s ability to use processes in ServiceNow to develop (rather than hinder) agility and responsiveness.
Insight: Reimagining work processes
There are three things you must get right upfront to reimagine and improve work processes when implementing ServiceNow:
Know your starting point. Document processes and figure out how they currently work. Starting by assigning process owners who can focus on assessing specific processes.
Identify and prioritize opportunities for process improvement based on where you can most efficiently deliver value to the business.
Decide on and design process improvement strategies in collaboration with process owners, governance bodies, senior leaders, and relevant subject matter experts (SMEs) who are directly involved in executing the process
With practice, process improvement can act less like a ‘project’ with steps (as shown above), and more like an organizational culture – one that focuses on delivering business value, and where everyone (not just process owners) feels confident in surfacing and driving process improvement opportunities. 
Key Implementation Steps
Start
Improve
Optimize
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

4. Step 1a: Define process ownership
Defining responsibilities for process ownership and decision making is a necessary first step to build clarity and ensure that the organization takes advantage of process improvement opportunities. Defined ownership and oversight is required to ensure that processes are followed and adopted, and that processes are optimized and continually improved to realize business value. 
Ensure clear ownership for core processes
Assign process owners * (individuals responsible for the definition and oversight of a process) for processes managed on ServiceNow (e.g. a process owner for each ITSM process in IT, or for the HR employee onboarding process)
Decide whether process owners will be responsible for one process or will be responsible for multiple processes.**  
Make sure that process owners are subject matter experts in their assigned process, can positively influence the teams delivering processes, and can communicate and collaborate effectively.
Practitioner Insight: Certification in frameworks like ITIL and Six Sigma should not be the sole criterion for identifying process owners. The best process owners are skilled in influence and collaboration, so they can promote (rather than police) a company-wide culture of process improvement. 
* For IT, process owners are typically already aligned by a defined framework (e.g. "incident manager"). For non-IT, we would recommend defining processes that deliver specific value to the business that need owners (e.g. employee onboarding).
** Match process ownership with the scale of your organization. Small organizations and organizations with a starting/small footprint on ServiceNow may have only one owner dedicated to managing multiple processes (though there is a limit to the number of processes a single process owner has the time to reasonably handle). Larger organizations may assign a dedicated process owner to each process or even assign process ownership by region. 
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps

5. Step 1a: Define process ownership (continued 1)
Define process ownership responsibilities and authorities
Define and document ServiceNow process owner responsibilities and authorities including:
Responsibility for developing, documenting, and improving processes over time to deliver increasing business value
Responsibility for ensuring resources are dedicated to support the day-to-day delivery of the process
Responsibility for ensuring that relevant process teams, support roles, and themselves are trained at the appropriate level on how processes work in ServiceNow
Responsibility for working with other process owners to align the goals and objectives of their processes and identify the interfaces between the processes where needed
Responsibility for understanding relevant business objectives and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their process performance over time 
Authority to ensure the process is consistently rolled out and used by all departments managed by process managers who directly/indirectly report to the process owner
Authority to ensure consistent execution and administration of the process across IT departments and teams that support the process
Map new process ownership responsibilities and authorities with responsibilities and authorities of other existing roles (if you maintain an organizational ‘RACI’ chart that documents role responsibilities and accountabilities, simply add ’ServiceNow process owner’ to the chart)
Identify where ServiceNow process owner responsibilities and accountabilities may overlap with existing roles and verify that these overlaps will not cause confusion
Practitioner Insight: As you define process ownership, ask yourself three questions –
Does your organization follow a process framework of any kind? (e.g. ITIL)
If yes, how aware and/or educated is the broader organization about the processes in this framework?
If awareness and/or education is low, do I need to provide some sort of baseline education before I can meaningfully assign process ownership?
Defined process ownership is critical but process owners will be far less effective in an organization that doesn’t understand and value what they do. It’s important to consider up front how much you need to “spread the word” about the importance of process ownership and process frameworks throughout your organization, beyond just gaining senior leadership buy-in.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

6. Step 1a: Define process ownership (continued 2)
Communicate process owner responsibilities to senior leaders to build support for process improvement goals
Meet with senior executives to inform them of the importance of the process owner role and the value this process ownership can deliver, and to gain their support for it
Schedule monthly 1-on-1’s between process owners and appropriate senior executives within their function as an opportunity to vet their process improvement ideas and to earn leadership support
Engage process owners in all major review and budget meetings associated with their assigned processes
Ensure that process discussions are a regular part of senior leadership meetings
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

7. Step 1b: Map existing processes
If processes have not been formally documented at your organization, it’s worth investing in this mapping before deploying processes in ServiceNow. Start with mapping the processes that will be implemented during your initial deployment of ServiceNow.
Map how specific processes chain together to support the business outcome that you are looking to support with ServiceNow
Review the desired outcome of your ServiceNow implementation (e.g. “eliminating service outages through an improved detect-to-correct capability”) 
Define the set of end-to-end processes that contribute to that outcome (e.g. demand, project, knowledge and incident management), referred to as a ‘value stream’
Include processes that support planning, building, transition, delivering and running/supporting an outcome (e.g. you need effective event, incident, problem and change management processes to support “eliminating service outages through an improved detect-to-correct capability”)
Work with process owner(s) to build “as-is” process maps. These should document how work currently flows, and provide the baseline for identifying processes improvement opportunities
Document the steps from when a process starts to where it ends and note the outcome you expect to be completed at the end of the process. Consider using visual diagrams that depict how work flows
List all roles involved in the process
Record handoffs between both roles and systems involved in the process
Use existing process ‘run books’ when available to inform this mapping (Runbooks are compilations of routine procedures and operations carried out for a given process, typically including step-by-step decision trees that determine effective work flow decisions) 
Practitioner Insight: Organizations that have already invested in setting up a process framework (like ITIL or eTOM) may already have a lot of this mapping done. Don’t throw that out! Just take the ServiceNow process implementation process here as an opportunity to refine mapping along this process where possible and to re-evaluate where value is won or lost across your existing processes. Then you can capture desired value from ServiceNow without needing to starting from scratch.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

8. Step 1b: Map existing processes (continued)
Run a process review exercise with process owners and the teams responsible for each process to define where value is increased or lost in your ‘as is’ state.
Hold a workshop with your process owners to answer the following questions (ideally using historical data):
What’s our current baseline? –  Review “as-is” process maps to define how teams currently understand and practice the process, including known issues, potential redundancies, and definition(s) of terms. Identify inconsistencies or gaps in how different teams or team members understand the process
Where can we consolidate and streamline handoffs between teams, individuals, and systems? – Review handoffs to identify points where handoffs are creating unnecessary bottlenecks in existing process
Where are we collecting unnecessary data? – Identify where forms and requirements collect data that isn’t used or needed for the process to work.
Where are we seeing the longest cycle times? Why? – Identify process steps with consistently long cycles times and diagnose why.
Where do we have gaps in standards adherence? – Document process steps that do not consistently adhere to standards
Document process review findings, including details around when processes or process steps consistently fell short of expectations when answering the questions above
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

9. Step 2a: Identify process improvement opportunities
When you have documented which processes contribute to delivering your ServiceNow objectives and have mapped how they currently work, it’s time to map out how you want these processes to work in their ideal end state, in ServiceNow. After that, you can assemble a ‘wish list’ of process improvement opportunities to implement, starting with quick wins.
Work with process owner(s) to build “to-be” process maps that document how you want work to flow after implementing ServiceNow
Review “as-is” process maps and findings from the process review exercise (step 1)
Document new “to-be” process maps that depict how you would ideally want work to flow through the process, including details on:
How process steps should be re-defined
How and where handoffs should be modified or eliminated
which steps need to be improved (e.g. made faster, more reliable, easier to navigate, etc.) and how (e.g. automation, step removal, improved forms, etc.)
How “as-is” standards adherence gaps should be fixed
Compare as-is and to-be process maps to identify where you want to and/or need to make improvements to processes during and after ServiceNow implementation 
Review “as-is” and “to-be” process maps and document how they are different (and by how much)
Consider what you learned about your “as-is” processes during your process review exercise (step 1b) – Where are there handoffs or steps that take too long? Where are processes to difficult? Where are standards not followed?
Consider the fixes you suggest in your “to be” process maps – How did you want to redefine steps? Where did you want to eliminate or modify handoffs?
List the fixes and improvements needed to bring each process from the current “as-is” state to your ideal “to-be” end state
Practitioner Insight: It’s a good idea to take the time to define “to-be” process maps even if you intend to implement out-of-box (OOTB) ServiceNow processes (as we recommend in step 3). This mapping exercise provides an opportunity for your team to understand why changes are being made to existing processes as you move to ServiceNow, which will help them accept any new OOTB ServiceNow processes that you chose to implement. 
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

10. Step 2b: Select processes for improvement
Process improvement should be an ongoing, long-term effort. However, there are almost always easy improvement opportunities that resolve immediate pain points. Address these quickly before or while you implement processes on ServiceNow. Identifying these quick wins for initial, ‘phase 1’ improvement – improvements that can be realized in weeks rather than months, and that will be quickly visible – builds commitment for your ServiceNow implementation and provides fuel for further process standardization and improvement activities. 
Prioritize process improvement opportunities based on their ability to create the most value with the least cost and risk
Review the list of potential process fixes and improvement opportunities prepared in step 2a
Work with the process owner to select ‘quick win’ process improvements that can be made before or during ServiceNow implementation, prioritizing improvement opportunities that:
Are simple to implement (involve only a single process or process step)
Are low risk changes (those not impacting mission critical processes that will damage business outcomes if disrupted, e.g. changing processes that support accounting systems during the end of the fiscal quarter)
Involve few roles in handoffs or process decisions (no processes or process steps with complicated handoff procedures or decisions managed by senior leaders or governance boards)
Create immediate efficiencies for users (like simple automation improvements for processes like password resets)
Would deliver highly visible improvements (improvements that would be easier to measure and use as a “success story”)
Document a ‘short list’ of improvement opportunities that you think should be prioritized, and work with your Executive Sponsor to build these as projects in your implementation roadmap
Practitioner Insight: Quick wins can come from people simply being clearer about who does what – measure time spent on completing individual process activities to find slow steps that might be candidates for improvement. Be sure to record these time measurements for before and after improvements, as well as changes in quality and speed of outcomes, to demonstrate the impact of your process improvements.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

11. Step 3: Design process improvements
Once process improvement opportunities are identified and selected, it’s time to design how processes will actually be improved. ServiceNow platform owners and their teams are well positioned to orchestrate and support this process improvement design, but they will have to rely on process owners’ expertise to reimagine how work processes can flow better and deliver more value.
Work with process owners to decide whether "out of the box" (OOTB) ServiceNow processes will deliver the process improvements you want (meaning you can simply drop your existing processes and adopt OOTB), or if you will require configurations to OOTB
Compare “to-be” process maps with ServiceNow OOTB process maps and consider: 
If OOTB adequately supports the ‘value stream’ and objectives established in step 1 (if ‘no’, you likely need to make configurations to OOTB during initial implementation) 
If OOTB process will deliver some (or all) of the process improvement opportunities identified prioritized in step 3 (if ‘yes’, it likely makes sense to adopt OOTB processes to start)
Connect platform owners with process owners and other stakeholders to design how OOTB ServiceNow processes will be modified and configured to deliver needed process improvements, as prioritized in step 2b
Assign process improvement design to the process owner and ServiceNow admins and developers in your organization
Schedule meetings between process owners, ServiceNow administrators, and IT automation SMEs to design process improvements via automation, especially in IT processes like incident, change, and configuration management
Update ”run books” and “as-is” process maps to depict new, post improvement process state
Meet with your executive sponsor, governance board members, and other senior leadership to communicate the proposed improvements
Gather feedback to inform final decisions on which designs to implement
Practitioner Insight: Try to limit configuration and customization where possible to avoid complexity. When you do implement configurations or customizations, be sure to assess how those configurations and customizations can potentially increase complexity and technical debt.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

12. Step 4: Plan future process improvements
‘Baseline’ process improvement steps are all about defining process ownership, collecting a sense of your existing processes and how you ideally want them to work, and getting some ‘quick win’ process improvements under your belt before or during ServiceNow implementation. Of course, you also likely identified many other important process improvement opportunities that you couldn’t implement as initial ‘quick wins.’ Post implementation, you should work with process owners to develop a phased roadmap that charts your plans for implementing other process improvements over time. This roadmapping will keep your process improvement goals active until you can start to source new process improvement ideas and foster a ‘process improvement mindset’ in your organization.
Work with process owners to develop a phased roadmap for further process improvement after initial ServiceNow implementation
Plan a sequence of process improvements that will capture all identified process improvement opportunities over time (typically 2-3 years)
Schedule periodic audits (at least twice each year) to assess progress against process improvement goals
Update your process improvement roadmap after every ServiceNow upgrade to identify where new capability/functionality surfaces new process improvement opportunities, or addresses opportunities in your backlog (or on your roadmap)
Update your roadmap periodically (every 6 or 12 months) to reflect any changes in organization, leadership, vision, mission, business values, etc.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

13. Step 4: Plan future process improvements (continued)
Prioritize process improvement plans in your roadmap based on how much business value they will deliver/support, prioritizing process improvements that increase speed and stability
Review the sequence of process improvement plans in your roadmap and work with process owners to select processes that should be prioritized for additional improvement
Compare the time that is currently spent on processes or process steps to identify those which are currently most time consuming. Would it take more time to improve the process than the improvement itself would save process users over one year? If yes, consider dropping or de-prioritizing this improvement plan from your roadmap. If no, consider prioritizing it on your roadmap to deliver time savings earlier.
Assess the potential risks associated with changing each process and prioritize process improvements with relatively low risks.
Assess the costs and benefits associated with implementing process improvements on the roadmap. Prioritize process improvements where you get the most benefit at minimal cost. Don’t worry about calculating exact dollar values for costs at this stage – just go through a simple assessment to identify potentially easy opportunities to deliver value.
Look at how many handoffs and manual steps remain in your ServiceNow processes. Prioritize process improvements that will reduce the number of manual steps and handoffs.
Consider prioritizing process improvement where the number of people involved in decision making is more than three people for any step of the overall process
Identify any process decisions that can “break the business” and avoid changing processes directly or indirectly involved in supporting those decisions, where possible
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

14. Step 5a: Develop a system to continually identify process improvement
As process maturity increases, process owners should focus not only process efficiency, but also on process effectiveness in supporting outcomes. Process owners must understand how the output of their process is important to customers of the process and must understand how the process supports business outcomes. To ensure the process is running effectively, process owners should track metrics that relate process and business outcomes, and work with business partners and vendors to identify opportunities to streamline, improve, and automate processes.
Measure and monitor process effectiveness on an ongoing basis
Request each process owner to assemble 2-3 metrics (Key Performance Indicators) that can reliably gauge process effectiveness in supporting intended (critical) outcomes
Work with process owners to select metrics that measure the impact of each process on the different business areas it supports (e.g. % of onboarding employees that receive their laptops on day 1)
Document expected trends and variances in metric performance
List all metrics, by relevant process, and vet with your executive sponsor, governance boards, or another senior leader
Consider whether metrics measure how effectively each process meets the expectations and needs of the organization, whether in terms of speed, quality, risk reduction, or another outcome
Track all metrics in a dashboard, where metrics are updated at least bi-weekly (aspire to build a live dashboard, potentially using ServiceNow Performance Analytics)
Review metrics during monthly process owner meetings to inform future process improvement needs
Provide up-to-date process performance metrics for governance board and leadership meetings
Practitioner Insight: When defining the metrics you use to track performance, don’t make the mistake of looking at the activity in a process as an indicator or proxy for outcomes. For example, tracking “# of incidents we are resolving” will tell you how active your incident management process is, but it won’t necessarily tell you how effective your incident management process is at keeping the business productive by ensuring that system crashes are resolved quickly. You can more effectively measure the value your incident management process is delivering to users by tracking the average amount of time it takes you to resolve issues (or “mean time to resolution”). When “mean time to resolution” goes down, you can confidently say that you are increasing business productivity by reducing how much time is lost by system outages.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

15. 5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
Step 5a: Develop a system to continually identify process improvement (continued)
Consolidate and create process reporting
Coordinate meetings between process owner and governance authorities so process owners can identify what reporting is currently being done (if any), who reports go to, and what decisions they use those reports for
Check that process owners can articulate the following three focuses for all existing and newly created process reporting:
Intended outcomes of the process (e.g. from HR “all onboarding employees receive their laptop on day 1”)
Sense of how to diagnose process shortfalls
A list of predictive indicators of process success/failure
Ensure that all reporting is crafted to target the audiences that use them
Consider where ServiceNow Performance Analytics can inform your process reporting
Retire reporting that is not used
Practitioner Insight: Process reporting may have multiple stakeholders, who need differing types of information. While some high-level metrics can be standardized, consider producing multiple reports that provide the information critical to each stakeholder group.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

16. 5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
Step 5a: Develop a system to continually identify process improvement (continued)
Measure process owners on continuous process improvement efforts
Meet with process owners at least monthly to brainstorm new process improvement opportunities
Work with process owners to set goals for continual process improvement
Define the ideal end state for each process and discuss potential steps needed to get there
Decide how frequently they will investigate process improvement opportunities
Set goals for how much process improvement will be done via automation
Meet with the process owners’ managers to promote setting explicit performance criteria associated with process owners process improvement goals, so they can be measured and can get official recognition for process improvement efforts
Propose these metrics: “# process improvement ideas generated” and “# process improvements executed” and “% of process improvement ideas involving automation”
Set goals for the process owner to ensure that users, fulfillers (e.g. help desk roles), and stakeholders for their process are aware of their process, how it is delivering value, and how it has been improved over time
Measure process adoption, with a focus on fulfiller adoption and awareness
Practitioner Insight: Some organizations already have dedicated owners for continuous service and/or process improvement. In ITIL, for example, continuous improvement is a critical part of the service lifecycle and roles are assigned to specifically manage continuous improvement. If similar responsibilities are assigned to roles in your organization, collaborate with these roles to learn from their experiences.
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

17. Step 5b: Re-focus on creating business value
An initial wave of process improvement successes can create enthusiasm for process.  But your organization should not pursue “process for process’ sake,” optimizing processes without considering what this ‘buys’ process users. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that process improvements can come with diminishing marginal returns: the cost of additional process improvement should be explicitly evaluated against the additional business value it delivers, whether in terms of cost savings, faster speed-to-market, or improved quality of service for employees and customers. Part of building a process improvement mindset involves maturing how process improvement opportunities are selected and pursued based on the business value they can create. 
Prioritize process improvement investments based on creating business value
Make sure your process owners have a clear understanding of the business objectives you are trying to achieve by improving processes on ServiceNow (e.g. have them define explicitly in your “to-be” maps how your ideal, “to-be” end state process will support a business objective like “eliminating service outages through an improved detect-to-correct capability”)
Include business-value-oriented metrics selected by process owners (step 5) in new documents
Work with process owners to re-prioritize process improvement opportunities on the roadmap to prioritize opportunities that best support business objectives (e.g. prioritize improvements that will most directly support the objective of “eliminating service outages through an improved detect-to-correct capability,” even if those improvements are not ‘quick wins’ or ‘low cost and/or risk’)
Identify process improvements that will generate maximum business value relative to cost (the metrics you decided to track in step 5a can guide what improvements you need to prioritize to perform against those metrics)
Assess the relative value of improvement opportunities across processes to identify where investments in one process can positively impact the performance of other processes (for example: effort invested in configuration management may have greater downstream benefits for incident and change management than direct investments in those processes)
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

18. Step 6: Build a process improvement culture
Process improvement is not just the responsibility of the process owners and governance teams. Senior leaders should lead the development of a “culture of process,” in which staff at all levels are invested in continual process improvement. A process-oriented culture does not need to be bureaucratic and rigid – rather, it’s a recognition that any process can be improved and changed, and vests teams with the incentives and authority to do so.
Foster an organizational and cultural focus on process to support business outcomes
Meet with senior leaders to pitch the value of developing a “culture of process” where continual process improvement is viewed as an intrinsic part of the organization’s culture and/or value system
Leverage your executive sponsor or ServiceNow governance board members to coordinate meetings with senior leaders
Lead your conversation with early value obtained via ‘quick win’ process improvements
Support pitch using metrics and performance against set process owner goals
Discuss how to incentivize and reward non-process-owners for proactive process improvement identification, especially those involving opportunities to improve process via automation
Support senior leaders who buy in to inspire a “process culture” by providing them with success stories and metrics that they can discuss during leadership and all-hands meetings to make their teams aware of the importance of continuous process improvement
Make continuous process improvement an organizational mandate
Meet with process owners and discuss the potential for ideas for process improvement to be sourced from outside of their immediate team
Require process owners to spend time with all stakeholders of their process, to encourage insight from across the organization around how processes can be changed and improved
Have process owners explore where consumers of their process find where certain steps in a process or interactions with other processes cause issues
Document ideas from process consumers on how to improve on processes
Integrate process improvement activities with organizational governance
Schedule quarterly meetings between process owners and the ServiceNow governance team lead to discuss how process needs and improvement plans relate to governance measures
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture
Steps
Steps
1. Assess existing processes
2. Identify process improvement opportunities
3. Design process improvements
4. Plan future process improvement opportunities
5. Continually identify process improvement opportunities
6. Build a process improvement culture

19. KPIs and Stakeholders Key Performance Indicators Essential KPIs
# and % of formal Process Reviews carried out of total planned
# of weaknesses identified during Process Reviews, to be addressed by improvement initiatives
% improvements addressed
# process improvement ideas generated (per quarter)
# process improvements executed (per quarter)
# of incidents related to non-compliance with process
% of processes/process steps automated
‘Nice to Have’
# waivers allowed by governance committees (by process)
# process waivers that didn’t need governance approval
# ideas for process improvement generated outside of process delivery teams
% of ideas in process improvement pipeline that involve automation
Customer satisfaction scores/ process ease of use scores (scale of 1 to 10)
% of process owners with monthly 1-1s with appropriate senior executive
Stakeholder Map
Responsible/Accountable
Process owners
Process managers
ServiceNow platform owners
ServiceNow governance team lead
Consulted/Informed
CIO
Business leadership
Service owners
CISO
Audit
ServiceNow governance committees
Business stakeholders (informed only)
Vendor representatives (informed only)
Development teams
Business engagement teams
Partners