The ServiceNow OCM models Partners should consider
If your organization doesn’t currently offer ServiceNow organizational change management (OCM) support, now is the time to prepare to fulfill this need for your clients. Learn how to assess your firm’s current and future states to determine the most appropriate resourcing model for you.
Are clients asking for organizational change management (OCM) services after you’ve signed your statement of work? Or are you getting feedback from rejected RFPs you need to start offering ServiceNow OCM?
Then it may be time to consider adding OCM training and support to your agreements.
ServiceNow lists OCM and training as a category of evaluation requirements clients should use when assessing and selecting partners. However, clients often don’t realize they need to ask for OCM support specifically outside of implementation support.
Of course, you want to meet your client’s requests, even if they are outside your statement of work. But that can be challenging when your firm isn’t currently staffed to provide the services they are asking for.
If your organization doesn’t currently offer OCM support services, now is the time to prepare to fulfill this need for your clients. Fortunately, you have multiple options for how to approach offering OCM services to clients as a ServiceNow partner. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to assess your firm’s current and future states to determine the most appropriate resourcing model. You might even be able to start your journey to implement a right-sized OCM practice for your firm!
5 questions to ask yourself to assess your ServiceNow organizational change management needs
Your assessment begins with five essential questions:
- What are clients asking for, and what levels of change complexity would I need to be able to support?
- What skills do my current team members have?
- How quickly do I need to get my ServiceNow organizational change management offerings up and running?
- How scalable do the ServiceNow OCM offerings need to be?
- What’s my budget?
Answer each question as honestly as possible. The answers will tell you which OCM capability level your firm should aim to reach.
The OCM Capability Levels (i.e. "Maturity")
Note that no level is “better” than the others; it depends on what makes the most sense for you and your teams to deliver the ServiceNow organizational change management services your clients need. So, the best level for you is the one your team can support to meet your clients’ requirements.
4 ways to approach offering OCM as a ServiceNow Partner
Once you have decided to offer ServiceNow organizational change management services as a ServiceNow partner, you have a few options. Let’s look at the 4 ways you can approach offering OCM services:
1. Upskilling existing resources
Look at your in-house team and existing resources to determine if this option is right for you. It entails developing in-house tools and templates while upskilling your existing business process specialists, Scrum masters, or project managers to support client demands on the projects they are already working on. Ideally, if you go this route, you should leverage in-house resources who know how to manage organizational change or have done it before.
Pros to upskilling existing resources
Upskilling can potentially save companies tens of thousands of dollars compared with hiring new employees. This approach is particularly beneficial for offering OCM for smaller implementations by incorporating change activities into an existing team’s work plan and structure. Plus, offering repeatable OCM support at the project level is a crucial way to improve the employee experience of your current and future clients.
It’s also critical that your sales team is taught how to communicate the value of OCM to potential clients.
Cons to upskilling existing resources
Of course, this plan only works if employees are interested in it and have some skills required to upskill. Some team members may not be interested in learning how to do OCM. In addition, if you don’t have in-house OCM subject matter experts (SMEs), it can be challenging to develop and operationalize OCM tools.
If you’re in this situation, you may want to work with an OCM partner like SkyPhi to purchase tools and training materials to benefit your team as you upskill them.
2. Hiring OCM practitioners to become in-house OCM SMEs
As mentioned above, upskilling your current workforce only works if you have employees with some OCM experience who are prepared to add OCM to their workload.
If that is not the case, then you may decide to choose option 2: hire OCM practitioners who can become your in-house OCM SMEs. This approach entails going to the market to hire an existing OCM practitioner who will bring their own tools and templates in-house. The OCM SME you bring in will likely be spread across multiple clients, bringing focus and consistency to the projects they are assigned.
Pros to hiring ServiceNow organizational change management practitioners
This option lets you scale the number of employees versus contractors you want to hire to keep your budget in line. It may also be faster than trying to upskill existing employees lacking OCM experience.
Cons to hiring OCM practitioners
First, you have less control over the tools and templates the resource you bring in uses since they will want to work with their existing processes. Also, ServiceNow OCM practitioners tend to get over-allocated across projects in their portfolio quickly. They may focus on their billable hours, which limits their ability to build an organization-wide scalable process.
Speaking of scalability, this option lacks it after a certain point. For example, we have heard of ServiceNow OCM practitioners being assigned to over 25 clients simultaneously. This type of extreme workload can lead to burnout and a lack of focus, meaning the quality of work will inevitably suffer.
3. Creating a right-sized OCM Center of Excellence (COE)
Ok, so what are you supposed to do if you don’t have existing resources to upskill and don’t want to bring in an OCM SME for one-off engagements?
The third option is to create a right-sized OCM center of excellence (COE) in partnership with your organization’s leadership team. The OCM organization would be integrated with all related business processes – RFPs, sales meetings, SoW reviews, engagement planning, kickoffs, Scrum meetings, etc.
Pros to creating a right-sized COE
This option brings consistency, scalability, and organizational-wide integration. If done right, the OCM COE would provide strategic and tactical support to the entire operation. As a result, it is more likely to become a key differentiator for your firm than firms that are lower on the maturity model.
Cons to creating a right-sized COE
This could take some time to implement. Depending on your current in-house resources, it could take up to 18 months to fully implement if your OCM SMEs are working on too many engagements at once. Consider hiring an OCM partner like SkyPhi to accelerate the effort.
4. Working with an OCM Partner
What if you’re not quite ready to implement an OCM COE, but you still want all of the benefits for your engagements and your clients? Working with an OCM Partner from RFP through Hypercare allows for the benefits of an organized OCM practice without having to create one yourself. Partnering on engagements with an OCM partner like SkyPhi can help your company land more RFPs and deliver on your commitments more successfully.
Download our one-pager to learn more about the types of OCM support we offer:
Pros to working with an OCM Partner
This option brings consistency, scalability, and integration in individual engagements. It increases the quality of your OCM resources and eliminates the need to manage them yourself. It also eases the start-up cost and ramp-up time for getting started. It also shifts the cost of OCM to the client, lowering the overall risk for your firm.
Cons to working with an OCM Partner
Because you’re Partnering with an OCM firm rather than hiring a one-off OCM contractor, this option doesn’t bring in additional OCM revenue to your firm–but it will likely improve the success rates of your projects and increase your client retention rates.
How do the ServiceNow OCM models compare?
None of these models is overall the “best.” Instead, each has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on your current organizational structure and priorities.
Conclusion
If your clients are asking for ServiceNow organizational change management services, you must find ways to support their needs. By assessing your firm’s current and desired future state, you can pick an OCM Resourcing model that best fits where your organization is now and where it needs to be in the future.
Want to discuss which model is best for your organization and how SkyPhi can help? Schedule a call to discuss what we’ve seen work at other ServiceNow Partner firms and what we can do for you.
Ready to start planning your OCM Implementation?
Download our free OCM Implementation Roadmap to get started planning today.