1. Baseline and track performance, usage KPIs, and metrics
Success Pillar: State and measure your business goals

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 an executive sponsor to drive change and remove roadblocks 1
Manage to
out of the box 1
Design an engaging self-service employee and 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 wins 3
Build a dedicated, dynamic governance process, policies, and team 3
Plan your architecture, instances, integrations, and data flows 3
Create a 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 and train users 5
Define and map out your business services 5
Build a community of champions 6
Manage platform demand

3. Baseline and track performance, usage KPIs, and metrics
Metrics are essential to measuring progress toward set outcomes. When you baseline and track the right metrics to measure ServiceNow® performance and adoption, as well as the amount of value ServiceNow delivers to your business, you can assess whether you’re getting what you expected from your deployment and course correct as needed. Metrics also help prove that your ServiceNow deployment is supporting business objectives, providing insight into where ServiceNow is generating immediate value to the business and where you expect to deliver future value.
Insight: Baseline and track performance
There are three things you must get right upfront to effectively baseline and track performance:
Understand your objectives and vision for implementing ServiceNow in your organization. Without knowing what end goal you’re trying to measure progress against, your investments in metrics won’t deliver useful information.  
Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you if your ServiceNow implementation is on track and delivering value to the business.
Define the diagnostic metrics that you and your team can use to predict and diagnose KPI performance and inform course corrections as needed.
Once you’ve defined a set of workable KPIs and metrics, treat your metrics use as a program—one that you update and refine as your business goals and ServiceNow implementation evolve. 
Key implementation steps
Start
Improve
Optimize
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

4. Step 1: Understand your business objectives
The end goal to baselining and tracking performance is to assess whether you’re on or off track with delivering expected business outcomes. To do this well, it’s important to first understand your organization’s vision for ServiceNow, the business outcomes you expect to deliver, and the plan for delivering these outcomes over time. This makes it possible to define a credible set of KPIs that, when used together, can directly measure progress and indicate whether you’re on the path to value. 
Review your ServiceNow vision, business case, and phased program plan to understand what you’ll need to measure to reliably track progress toward achieving business value
Review your documented ServiceNow vision, considering:
What value you’re trying to deliver to the business using ServiceNow – For example, it might be modernize service management to increase the speed of IT. 
The most important thing you need to measure to assess if you’re supporting the vision – For example, it might be changes in IT speed.
Review your ServiceNow business case, considering: 
The business outcomes that were promised in the business case – This lets you know the degree of improvement needed, such as 10% increase in IT speed.
When the business case promises outcomes – This provides a rough sense of the amount of time you need to measure value. For example, a 10% increase in IT speed in 18 months.
Review the ServiceNow phased program plan, considering: 
The solutions that will be implemented to deliver the business value promised in the business case for ServiceNow – This lets you know what specific capabilities you need to measure to be able to comprehensively track progress toward delivering value. For example, you might implement incident management and change management on ServiceNow to increase how quickly you’re able to manage IT operations.
When the solutions will be implemented and in what order – This shows what’s most important to measure first. For example, you might start by implementing incident management and then change management. If so, you should focus first on measuring incident management implementation and performance.
Practitioner insight: Technical experts often jump directly into defining KPIs that measure how well their systems perform. While system-level KPIs are an important part of measuring the value that ServiceNow can deliver, they don’t speak directly to business value, and they overlook the potential for ServiceNow to be a strategic platform. Take the time upfront to understand business objectives and apply your understanding to define a comprehensive set of KPIs that both inform technical decisions and measure the value you're delivering to your business users. 
Steps
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

5. Step 2a: Define outcome KPIs
Defining outcome KPIs (indicators that measure the outcomes delivered by what you’ve implemented on ServiceNow) is an important step to being able to actually measure progress toward a high-level vision. Consider this: How do you measure the KPI 10% increase in IT speed? Instead of trying to measure that more abstract goal directly, you need to define KPIs that act as proxies to help you measure the many components that you need to perform to reach that abstract goal. Combined with implementation KPIs that tell you if the technology itself is working well (defined in Step 2b), outcome KPIs can help you assess if you’re executing your vision for ServiceNow.
The Now Platform owner should partner with relevant service owners and process owners to define outcome KPIs that measure how the solutions implemented on ServiceNow are delivering value and enabling expected business outcomes (e.g., by measuring the improvements to incident management that are helping increase how fast incidents are resolved)
Consider the following questions to identify what outcome indicators you need to measure:
How does each solution implemented on ServiceNow contribute to delivering business value, as promised in your business case for ServiceNow? 
For example, how does implementing incident management on ServiceNow help you modernize service management to increase IT speed by 10% in 18 months? One potential answer is that Incident management can be more automated and streamlined on ServiceNow, which means you can resolve incidents faster with fewer people directly involved in managing the process. 
What do I need to measure about the implemented solution, based on how that solution delivers business value? 
For example, to measure if successfully deploying incident management on ServiceNow helps deliver IT speed by reducing the amount of time needed to resolve incidents, you need to be able to measure the speed delivered by the deployed solution.
Practitioner insight: The set of outcome KPIs you need changes depending on what you’re implementing and what goals you have. What’s important is that you define outcome KPIs that actually measure the outcome, or value, that’s being delivered by your implementation to meet your goal. To do this well, you need to first consider what value you need to deliver with each solution implemented on ServiceNow to support your vision, then figure what would need to happen to indicate that you’re delivering the value needed with each solution, and finally define a well-articulated KPI that can provide evidence of whether or not that value is being delivered.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps

6. Step 2a: Define outcome KPIs (Continued)
Define one to three KPIs per implemented solution that measure how that solution supports a desired business outcome.
Consider the key benefit that each implemented solution needs to deliver to enable your vision, such as speed, cost, quality, etc.
Consider the indicators that you could measure that would tell you how much value the implemented solution is delivering and helping you enable your vision.
For example, if you want to increase speed, you can measure reductions in the time it takes for a process to work from end to end, how long each individual process substep takes, or how long a critical step in the process takes.
Define a KPI that will measure this indicator, such as % reduction in the time it takes to resolve incidents and/or average time to complete each process substep.
Practitioner insight: ServiceNow Performance Analytics offers over 500 different out-of-the-box (OOTB) KPIs that you can select to track. Once you’ve decided what you need to measure, consider how you can use Performance Analytics to quickly enable real-time performance tracking directly on the Now Platform®.
Practitioner insight: Outcome KPIs should be directly linked to the business case that was created to justify your investment in ServiceNow. This business case is typically based on KPIs that provide measurable indicators that show if you’re delivering business value. By tracking these KPIs, you can track if you’re realizing the value that was projected in the business case.
* See the appendix for example outcome KPIs by business outcome.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps

7. Step 2b: Define implementation KPIs
Measuring and tracking KPIs provides proof that you’re making progress toward achieving the overall vision for your ServiceNow implementation. Outcome KPIs (defined in Step 2a) are critical because they help directly measure business outcomes—but to comprehensively track progress, you also need to define implementation KPIs that help you measure if you set the technology up correctly, are optimizing system performance, are seeing the usage and adoption you need, and if solutions are implemented well on the platform.
Work with the Now Platform owner, relevant service owners, and process owners to define implementation KPIs that measure platform performance, adoption, and solution deployment to indicate if the implementation is meeting its objectives (e.g., technical stability, adoption, etc.)
Define platform performance KPIs that will measure the quality and reliability of the Now Platform. Consider using these KPIs:
% uptime – Measures the percent of time when the Now Platform is in operation, providing an indicator of how reliable your platform is
Mean time to repair (MTTR) – Measures the average time it takes to repair the platform when it goes down, providing a basic measure of how maintainable and repairable your platform is
% of incidents resolved within service level agreements (SLAs) – Measures how reliably you can restore services on the Now Platform within the time limits you set with platform users in your SLAs
Define adoption KPIs that will measure how successfully ServiceNow is being adopted in your organization. Consider using these KPIs:
# of unique users migrated to platform – Measures how many users have started to use the Now Platform (adoption)
# of processes migrated to platform – Measures how many processes have migrated to use the Now Platform (adoption) 
Average # of daily uses – Measures how much the processes on the Now Platform are being used (usage)
Define solution implementation KPIs that can measure how well each process/service is implemented on ServiceNow. Consider these:
Average time to complete the process (or fulfill a request) – Measures process speed to track improvements in speed over time (e.g., improved incident resolution time)
% process success rate – Measures the quality of your services by tracking how often your processes work as expected (e.g., change management success rates measure how often your change management process successfully enacts a change without incident)
% process availability – Measures how available and reliable your process is for users
# of users/process owners using the process – Measures adoption for specific services to track adoption increases or decreases over time
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps

8. Step 2c: Set KPI performance goals
Once you’ve defined the KPIs you need to report on, you need to set performance goals for each KPI that you can track across each phase of your ServiceNow project plan. It’s also important that you consider how often you need to collect data to update KPI measurements in order to inform the groups that use KPIs to guide their day-to-day work and decision-making. 
Set baseline metrics and goal metrics for all defined KPIs
Gather historic data (when possible) showing relevant past performance measurements to compare with your new KPI measurements. For example, your current state may be 10 touch points to manage incidents.
Set goal values for each newly defined KPI with a set time frame for when you want to achieve those goals. If your desired end state is six touch points to manage incidents within 18 months, it results in a 40% reduction in touch points to manage incidents. 
Document these goals so you can refer to them when presenting on KPI performance in the future.
Set intermediate KPI target goals for each phase of your program plan
Review your ServiceNow phased project plan.
Define target KPI performance goals for the end of each phase in your project plan. For example, set goals for ServiceNow adoption at 1,000 unique ServiceNow users by end of phase 1 (6 months) then for 2,500 unique ServiceNow users by end of phase 2 (12 months) and so on.
Focus first on setting goals for phase 1 for all defined KPIs.
Record when KPI performance goals are met or missed over time.
Define what your KPIs enable and how often measurements are needed
Identify the specific actions or decisions that each KPI informs (e.g., budget adjustments, work prioritization, investment decisions, etc.).
Consider how often each KPI will be used to inform those actions or decisions (e.g., the KPI # of tickets in backlog informs an administrator's day-to-day work and should be provided frequently, whereas KPIs measuring platform adoption rates might only need to inform actions or decisions during monthly leadership meetings).
Schedule when KPI performance will be measured and recorded based on how frequently the KPI is used to inform actions or decisions.
Display KPI results on a dashboard, either using ServiceNow Performance Analytics dashboarding capabilities or your own format.
Practitioner insight: Consider how different groups—process users, the executive steering board, governance bodies, service owners, etc.—can use KPI performance to guide where they need to focus their work. Use this insight to provide only relevant KPI results to each separate group and to potentially guide custom dashboard design for each group. 
Steps
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

9. Step 3: Define diagnostic metrics
KPIs are important performance indicators, best used to report on progress and prompt decisions at the leadership level. However, they don’t necessarily provide the ServiceNow implementation and management team enough detailed information to know that they’re doing the right things on a daily basis and when something goes wrong in time to course correct. To fill this gap, you also need to define diagnostic metrics (metrics that report on the performance of various processes or activities that, together, contribute to achieving KPI goals) that you and your team can track to be able to predict and understand more granularly what is happening with KPI performance. These metrics should help you be able to diagnose KPI performance trends so you know how to reprioritize work and adjust project plans to resolve roadblocks that could jeopardize your ability to achieve business outcomes. 
Define diagnostic metrics that help you and your team understand KPI results and that inform how you can influence them
Review each of the KPIs you defined in Step 2.
Determine if you’re able to influence the performance of each KPI directly in a daily or weekly time frame. If not, consider defining and tracking other related metrics that you know how to influence and that could be used to predict how the KPI will perform longer term.
For example, # of unique users migrated to the platform is difficult to influence short term, so tracking something more manageable like % of process owners trained on ServiceNow provides you with a metric you know how to influence—by training process owners. And it can be used to predict if you’ll meet your user adoption KPI goals, because it’s more likely that users will migrate to the platform if process owners are trained on using it.
Define if each KPI provides enough information for you to know how to course correct if performance is poor. If not, consider what other related metrics you can measure that will help inform project plan adjustments to steer KPI results positively.
For example, % reduction in the time it takes to resolve incidents measures changes in how long it takes the incident management process to flow from end to end, but what do you do if this time isn’t going down? Defining diagnostic metrics like reduction in number of touch points to manage incidents or average amount of time spent at each touch point provides easily measurable indicators that can inform what’s preventing expected KPI performance.
Define diagnostic metrics for each KPI as needed, depending on your assessment above. Ensure that your ServiceNow platform team is aware of these metrics, and build a dashboard to track them so the team can diagnose performance trends and predict whether their work is on or off course.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps
Steps
1. Understand business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

10. Step 3: Define diagnostic metrics (Continued)
Use diagnostic metrics to inform course corrections in project plans
Review KPI performance at least monthly.
Involve your team in investigating where KPI performance is trending to miss target goals (set in Step 2c), using diagnostic metrics as indicators.
Document why you think KPI performance was abnormal, citing diagnostic metrics that support your analysis.
Revise project plans (deadlines, project sequencing, planned deployments/updates, etc.) based on your findings.
Practitioner insight: You likely won’t need to define diagnostic metrics for each of your defined KPIs. For example, many implementation KPIs might speak for themselves. But you’ll need diagnostic metrics that help you figure out what’s happening with some of your KPIs (especially for outcome KPIs) if you want to understand the root cause of KPI performance and actually influence them.
Practitioner insight: Implementation KPIs can also provide useful insight as diagnostic metrics to diagnose the cause for trends in outcome KPI performance. For example, if operations teams are not adopting incident management on ServiceNow at the rate you expected, it’s unlikely that you’ll realize expected cost decreases associated with the implementation of that capability).
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps
Steps
1. Understand business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

11. Step 4: Continually improve metrics tracking
Once you’ve defined a useful set of KPIs and diagnostic metrics, it’s time to consider how you’ll make sure that your efforts to measure performance continue to deliver what they’re intended to deliver over time. Treating performance measurement and tracking as a one-time project is a mistake. Instead, continue to invest to make sure you define your metrics as well as is possible, update them when necessary, and share them with the right people. 
Define accountability for ongoing metrics management
The Now Platform owner should partner with their executive sponsor to assign one or more metrics managers with the responsibility and accountability for ongoing metrics management, including:
Finding and maintaining the data sources needed to report on defined KPIs, which is critical because ServiceNow may be connecting to and consolidating multiple data sources across many systems to generate reports
Revisiting your ServiceNow vision, business case, and project plan documents every six months to see if any changes have been made that would require KPI redefinition
Periodic review—at least monthly and always after new business and/or ServiceNow visions and objectives are set—of what KPIs need to be tracked, removing existing KPIs that are no longer relevant, and identifying when new metrics are needed 
Redefining KPIs in collaboration with process or service owners as needed
Sharing KPI dashboards with roles and groups that need them to inform decisions
Assessing whether diagnostic metrics are helping the ServiceNow team diagnose issues and make course corrections, and suggesting redefinition or new metrics as needed
Map new KPI management responsibilities and authorities with the responsibilities and authorities of other existing roles. (If you maintain an organizational RACI chart that documents role responsibilities and accountabilities, add “KPI manager(s)” to the chart.)
Identify where KPI management responsibilities and accountabilities may overlap with existing roles and verify that these overlaps will not cause confusion.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps
Steps
1. Understand business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

12. Step 4: Continually improve metrics tracking (Continued)
Have the role(s) assigned accountability for metrics tracking conduct a quarterly review of the existing metrics and how they’re measured and tracked
During metrics reviews, have the metrics manager(s) ask: 
Are the KPIs defined still a useful set of performance indicators?
Are your KPI data sources consistent and secure? Has data quality improved or deteriorated? 
Are you still tracking the most up-to-date KPIs? Have any objectives been fulfilled, meaning relevant KPIs no longer need to be tracked? Have there been any changes in your strategic vision or ServiceNow roadmap that might impact what you need to measure? Have there been any product changes from ServiceNow that impact what you need to measure?
Are your stakeholder groups still getting the information they need from dashboards? Are the KPIs actually informing the decisions they need to make? Would they suggest any improvements, redefinitions, or new KPIs? 
Are your diagnostic metrics helping you predict KPI performance, diagnose issues, and influence positive results?
Benchmark against peers (including companies in the same industry, of similar size in terms of revenue, number of employees, and competitors) every six to 12 months to source new ideas for how to measure and track performance, considering: 
Are they using similar KPIs if their objectives are consistent?
How are they performing? Are we ahead or behind?
Are there opportunities to learn from what peers are doing? For example, are they measuring cleverly defined KPIs that we aren’t using?
Where can we increase our KPI performance goals to leapfrog our peers?
Practitioner insight: Many organizations hire consulting or advisory companies to help them benchmark against other companies. While these services can provide extensive comparisons, they can be costly and time-consuming engagements. Alternatively, you can try partnering with peers at other companies to talk shop and compare results (although you should be careful about partnering this way with peers working at direct competitor companies). ServiceNow Community forums, user groups, and events are all opportunities to meet others who might be interested in this kind of informal benchmarking. If that’s not enough, ServiceNow Benchmarks and Data Insights can help you compare your service management performance to the industry averages of your peers.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps
Steps
1. Understand business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

13. Step 5: Extend metrics usage
Unless you invest in enabling others to view and use your measurements, metrics only offer evidence of how ServiceNow is supporting business outcomes to you, your team, and the senior leaders you report to. To fully realize the value of tracking ServiceNow metrics, you need all groups using ServiceNow in your organization to use metrics to tell them how they do work and make decisions. Excellent results are most likely when employees understand how to inform their work using past performance measurement.
Provide groups that can benefit from informing their work with ServiceNow KPI performance—process owners, operations teams, leadership, governance committees, etc.—with KPI measurements that are relevant to their work
List the different stakeholder groups that you think could benefit from using KPI performance to inform their work. These groups might include business leaders from each of the business areas you support with ServiceNow, governance boards, process owners, IT operations teams, partners, and vendors.
Work with someone from each of the groups on your list to discuss the types of information that would be most helpful to them, then help them select two to five KPIs (from those defined in Step 2) that will most closely provide the information they need.
If no predefined KPIs will provide the information they need, consider where you can define new KPIs.
Based on your conversation with someone from each group, build a custom dashboard for each group that presents up-to-date results for the KPIs you helped them select and explore how ServiceNow Performance Analytics can support this. 
Meet with someone from each metrics user group every six months to make sure that the KPIs on their dashboard are still relevant to the work they do.
During these meetings, collect examples of how their group used metrics to inform their work and decisions, looking for success stories that can be shared with leaders and members from other groups.
Practitioner insight: ServiceNow Performance Analytics offers a number of pre-built, OOTB dashboards already designed to inform different stakeholder groups that you can quickly turn on and share using the platform.
1. Understand your business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage
Steps
Steps
1. Understand business objectives
2. Define KPIs
3. Define diagnostic metrics
4. Continually improve metrics tracking
5. Extend metrics usage

14. KPIs and stakeholders Key performance indicators Essential KPIs
# of defined KPIs
% of KPIs with associated diagnostic metrics
# of project plan adjustments (associated with metrics performance)
# of groups using KPI measurements to inform work
Nice-to-have KPIs
% KPIs that have been redefined in current year
% change of total defined KPIs in current year
Stakeholder map
Responsible/accountable
Now Platform owner
ServiceNow executive sponsor
Service owners
Process owners
CIO/senior IT leadership
Consulted/informed
Enterprise architecture
Business engagement teams
IT staff (especially the help desk)
Vendors and partners
Business leaders (in areas where ServiceNow is implemented)

15. Appendix

16. Appendix: Example outcome KPIs by business outcome
Modernize IT service management
Take control of applications, projects, and financials
Eliminate service outages
Resolve real-time security threats fast
Consumerize the employee service experience
Resolve customer issues fast
Optimize performance with real-time analytics
Outcome KPIs
Reduction in incidents caused by changes
Reduction in number of touch points to manage incidents or requests
Improved request delivery
Reduction/ rationalization of applications under management
Reduction in the demand cycle time
Reduced cycle time for budget/ project portfolio planning
Reduced project cycle time
Reduction in incidents related to changes
Reduction in change planning time
Decrease in incidents
Decrease in outage MTTR
Decrease in major outages
Decrease in time to prioritize and resolve incidents
Reduction in backlog of security incidents and vulnerabilities
Reduction of business risk through visibility into critical services
Reduced time spent on enrichment tasks through automation and threat intelligence
Decrease in case resolution times
Improvements in employee satisfaction
Decreased cycle time in request process
Increased adoption of self-service
Increase in cases deflected through knowledge
Reduced time spent resolving cases
Improved first call resolution
Reduced average case handling time
Improved customer and agent satisfaction
Improved NPS
Improved customer retention
Reduction in customer effort
Reduction in number of reporting tools
Improvements in data accuracy
Improvements in employee productivity
Improvements in operational efficiency for services