ServiceNow Reviews

We primarily use the solution for change management and program management. Let's say, for example, if someone across our state needs a license. My team will send the request to me and I would approve it. For other tasks, they might send me a ticket and I would either approve it or add additional comments, however, that's it. 

The workflow and the general effectiveness of the processes have helped improve how our organization functions.

The workflow makes things extremely efficient and it improves effectiveness.

The product integrates well with other solutions. 

The stability has been very good so far.

We have found that the product can scale. 

Technical support has been helpful.

One of the areas that need improvement is when the product was implemented, they did not do a very good job of explaining all these features and functions, and capabilities of the tool. That could have been an implementation issue on our organization's side. This could have happened by not including end-users in order to get their input or to understand what this tool offers. It was kind of just pushed out. For example, while the tool could potentially do a hundred things, only 20 of the capabilities were explained. The other 80 we have to figure out on our own. It could have been explained and rolled out better, however, that could have been just an implementation issue on our side as well.

It became kind of complex to set it up without a general lack of knowledge of the particular feature-function capabilities. Features and capabilities could have been explained better to the end-users.

I have used the solution for about a year.

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product definitely can be scaled. We're working now to integrate it with other workflow products, so it's definitely scalable.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. We have a service desk. Since it's on-prem, it's been pretty good. Tech support has been helpful and we have no complaints. 

We did previously use a different solution, however, with ServiceNow, we find that it offers better scalability, ease of use, features, and functions.

My team did not implement ServiceNow, we do not maintain it and we do not service it. We just use the product.

I don't know what they had on the setup and the implementation part in terms of setting up servers and configuring servers and things like that. I don't know what that entails. We just know when we got it, we got a product. So what difficulties they might've had setting in up with, I don't know. I can't speak to that.

I don't handle any aspect of the payments or licensing process. I can't speak to it from personal experience. 

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I go in and approve service tickets, however, I am not a hardcore user of that platform. My team sends me a request, I open it up and I review the ticket and I approve it, and then it moves on. I don't follow the workflow or anything like that.

Our team uses the most recent version of the solution.

I would advise potential new users to make sure that in that user community, end-users are involved in the implementation from beginning to end and make sure that the end-users fully understand the features and capabilities of the tool before it is implemented across an organization. Their involvement is key to a successful implementation and very important.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are premium partners with ServiceNow and I'm a solutions architect. 

ServiceNow is one of the fastest‑growing cloud enterprise software companies in the world. We implemented ITSM, ITOM and ITBM for various customs and even in our organization which reduced operations costs infrastructure cost

This solution has a user friendly environment. ServiceNow offers a wide platform which allows us to explore other technologies and functionalities and provides a 360-degree view. Data in reports and dashboards are easily accessible. I also like the integration hub which is plug and play. You can integrate any tool with ServiceNow.

Need to focus on small business like Licensing, packaging

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

We don't have any complaints from our customers after they start using the product. Once they adapt to the new look and feel, and the user experience, there's no problem. 

We generally don't need much support. When it's necessary, I can contact the higher support team that deal with implementation and it's easy to connect with them and get a quick response. They are good. 

We used Remedy and we switched because Remedy is still using old technology

The initial setup is straightforward in ServiceNow. It's not complex, you can say it's out-of-the-box.

100%

If a company is looking for more accessibility, a user friendly environment where they want to explore other functionalities like HR and CSM, then ServiceNow provides that. I recommend this solution because they're always coming out with new technologies and functionalities. And the support level is very good even though things are automatically updated on a regular basis. 

I rate this solution a ten out of 10. 

We use this solution for managing IT assets and business operations.

We are also using it to help make better business decisions.

Using ServiceNow has forced conversations around the whole IT domain, on how we can manage the IT assets through their life cycles. This starts with identifying the need and introducing it, developing it, and deploying it, to then eventually making decisions to remove the asset from the operation.

I can use it to see the whole life cycle.

As a company, it's about how you get your data in there and manage it.

I like all of the operations and features that I have seen.

I like that it's running on a unified platform and that there is no data integration.

I can get a real-time view of how our assets are performing.

I also like that with the operations running on a unified platform, I can then get a better picture of ITHealth through the application platform management tool.

I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology. I can start showing the role some of the technologies are playing and talk about the health of the technology and even connecting it up to the business strategies. You can do that with the APM component.

I like having one platform to get that view.

The marketing needs improvement. This platform can really do a lot and I don't think they do it justice for what it can do. 

I have to go out there and market things. Whereas I think if their teams were a little more in tune with what they could actually deliver, they would do a better job selling it.

I still haven't seen a holistic picture of the whole platform and what they can really do. I don't know if that's intentional or if they're not selling it.

The visuals are the one area where there is opportunity for improvement. 

The reporting can be difficult, but they are making it a little easier to create reports or introduce a wizard to help you walk through them.

You have to know the entity-relationship diagram to get the right data and make the right connections. 

The visual representation of the data is an area where they fall short of, but they do have a partner who is native to their product. It does a much better job visualizing the data. I don't know if that is there, the way they're closing the gap.

I would like to see, from a business process automation perspective, where an engineer or architect could implement the automation. You don't have to write the spec and hand it off to a ServiceNow developer.

For some of the things that are happening with the other BPM tools, I'd like to see ServiceNow be a little more user-friendly. Another thing I'd like to see is that they have a representation and their service taxonomy of a more modern application for events business logic, as well as APIs. As it is now, it's still in the application and infrastructure perspective, but that's not totally a modern construction of an application.

I have been using ServiceNow for 12 years.

We are running the current version. 

From a SaaS perspective, it's very stable. I think in the 12 years that I've been running it, I have seen maybe one or two outages. For the most part, it's pretty stable.

I haven't really experienced any performance problems. I am assuming that they are monitoring and extending it when they need to.

I don't know how many users they have at my current company. In my last company, we had more than 1,000 users. They were primarily IT except for the work request part of it that came in from the entire enterprise.

It is being used extensively. There are definitely plans it increase the usage. I am working on the plans to extend it. It was just introduced in March, more for the kind of IT service side of it. Problems, incidents, change, and work requests for example. 

Now I am looking to bring in governance, risk, and compliance. 

Also, having conversations with other areas like business continuity, disaster recovery, and security about how they could leverage the same platform for some of their operations.

I think whoever purchased it had this in their vision, they're just not communicating who's vision right now. I have been having those conversations to get people to understand what we will be able to do in the future so that they buy into making the move and investing in learning how to use ServiceNow.

I wasn't on the support team. I am on the architecture team, but as far as technical insights go, and to help make decisions, they have been very good at sharing knowledge. 

I have a couple of connections right now who, as I'm trying to push things out a little bit more, I'm pinging. I am getting help with enterprise ERDs and different things, and they're very responsive to them.

I was not involved in the setup of this solution. It was already in place when I started with the company.

To others who are interested in implementing ServiceNow, I would say, consider it for running your IT operations, but implement it capability by capability. This will allow you to see the big picture of what you're going to get at the end of it. You can't do a big bang approach on this. Rather, you have to be very deliberate in how you implement it.

They have thought through it, and not just the whole domain in the platform but now they have connected it to the business side, the business needs and the processes, the work that people do down to the technology. I think that was missing a few years ago, probably more than a few years ago. Because I think they met with them in 2016 around it. But they have got that now, and it is really powerful. 

I've been working through the taxonomy with different parts of the organization and the fact that they can start making some of these connections in a system I think is phenomenal.

Also, they have the assets included. When you do an assessment to see, how healthy it is, you can not only see who has impacted the business applications that are impacted, which drives you to the people and the processes and all those things. You can also see what the root cause of the cross problem is, and manage the root cause in a more holistic manner.

For its space and what it is capable of doing, I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

We were using ServiceNow to collect data in problem areas in operations. Most recently we are using it for our internal hardware tracking. For example, if someone requires a change of computer system, new headset, or any other hardware defects.

ServiceNow has helped improve our organization by making it more efficient. Since we only need to manage the cloud service and not other aspects, such as infrastructure or software, this has freed up 30% of our human resources that can be utilized on other tasks. The solution has added value to the company.

The solution is easy to use, simple to make queries, flexible to configure, integrates well, and supports all of our companies needs.

If you want to do analysis about a problem or collect information and export the data on a spreadsheet or a BI system is very easy. The data is able to be selected very fast which is very good because, in general, to export or to restore the information with another tool was terrible. You practically needed to go directly to the database and export it from there instead of having the ability in the menu of the application. With ServiceNow, the options are in the menu and you can do all your queries directly and export them in different formats. This saves us a lot of time and makes our work a little easier.

The solution is always updating and you are able to see the road map of what is going to come in the future.

When we are using the solution on mobile phones on their networks the performance is reduced with a delay of approximately 8 seconds. There is less delay using the desktop computers connected to the WiFi or to the network directly.

I have been using the solution for approximately three years.

The solution is very stable. We have never had an issue with ServiceNow, I do not remember a time we had a problem with the application. However, there are problems with the network, internet connection, and mobile networks, but not in the application. If there is a connection issue once the connection is established again the recovery is very good because the data automatically start to flow without any problem between both applications.

Azure has had only one incident in three years of use in our experience. 

The solution is scalable. It is in the contract of the SaaS we have the ability to scale the solution in the cloud. We have never experienced problems because if we demand more capacity for processing we automatically receive it from Azure.

We have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week support. However, I have never needed to use it.

The installation or deployment is easy because this is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and it is managed by ServiceNow.

They analyze the use of the tools they provide us with and they do the new deployments in a slot time when we do not use the tool or have minimal use. They inform us typically more than a week in advance and they send several friendly reminders when the cloud service has to do a change, a new deployment, or an upgrade. They are very flexible to keep the downtime of the service at a minimum and at a time that the tools are not being used.

The color scheme we are using is not good because sometimes the background is difficult for me to view. However, this is a company decision and can be changed.

We use a SaaS solution because the service has improved performance and maintains the up-to-date security of the application. As a company, we do not need to worry about doing upgrades because everything is looked after by ServiceNow. It is a very good solution and has worked very well for us.

I rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution just for our ticketing purposes to keep track of our incidents, projects, and tasks.

We use it for internal projects, circuit routers, upgrades, keeping track of vendor contracts, et cetera. Basically, it's just a repository of everything that we do and to support our internal clients that deal with maintaining bookkeeping as well as providing the tickets, keeping track of projects, and stuff like that.

It's great for keeping everyone informed in the company - not just IT. Everyone becomes aware of change requests and incidents so the entire company is on the same page.

It's great that everybody is in the loop - especially from an incident perspective for a user. If I'm waiting for somebody to get back to me, or if I'm researching something, I could update the notes and I don't have to call the user. The user will get that ticket via email. They're aware. You don't have to go and chase people and update them individually, or even on a group basis. Whatever I enter into my notes is sent out to everyone. There's no gap in information sharing.

The general incident management is very good. On a day-to-day basis, we get incidents and we need to keep records. The incident tickets are being used a lot.

The change management within ServiceNow is great. It's great due to the fact that it keeps track, of everything. Any change requests that touch a particular business or function can be used and distributed amongst whoever's involved in that project. Everyone is informed of what changes are needed or done. I don't need to go and individually create a separate distribution list. It's simple.

The solution offers very good functionality and transparency.

From my perspective, when I create any incidents or even a change request or any projects that I'm dealing with, I could upload as many documents as I want, unless people take the software and they basically structure it to the way they want it. 

It's easy to use. If somebody is in an IT business or even has a basic knowledge of any ticketing system, they could learn it very quickly.

The solution is very stable.

The product scales well.

There aren't any improvements that I could suggest off top of my head, as it's a well-informed well-structured solution. From a business perspective or an individual, IT perspective, there isn't much to change at all. 

Some companies may find that adding as many documents as they like to an incident makes the solution problematic. 

Once a change request has been created once it's been approved and been submitted, there is no way to go in on that particular change request and submit an additional task. You would have to revert the change, then submit an additional task for a group to act on. I'd like it if we had the ability to, once the task had been approved and created, go in and create an additional task for a particular group to action. That's definitely one thing I would want to make a change to.

I've used the solution for a very long time. With my current company, I've used it for five years. However, I also used it at my previous company for around 20 years. It's been a few decades at this point.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any problems. It hasn't gone down and it hasn't crashed. There are no bugs or anything like that. I don't see it any now and I haven't in the past - even after 20 or more years. This is flawless software. 

It's scalable. You could easily modify it and you could create reports or you could do whatever you want to do with it based on the privileges. There's no downside to it. You could create your individual report or you could use a template and create your own individual report and you can use search criteria for your own searches for incidents, change, tasks, anything. It's very flexible.

We have about 100 users on the solution right now.

We may increase usage in the future. Right now, it's being used quite extensively.

I can't speak to how technical support is in terms of helpfulness. We'll go to our backend developers and they basically deal or interact with them. I haven't had any interaction with the ServiceNow technicians or anybody else from ServiceNow.

I've been in the industry for almost 20 or 25 years. With the previous ticketing system that I used to use, which was Remedy, there's a big difference. ServiceNow is just so much easier.

I didn't handle the initial setup.

That's a different group that does altogether. It's a packaging portion. We basically tell them if there are certain things or floor processes that we need to create. We'll create it on a front end, we'll create the diagram, the workflow, and everything else. We give it to the backend office and they'll basically make the changes as they go. They'll give us a test case scenario before it goes live, and any modification or any changes that are required. We reply back to them with the information and they basically make the changes according to what we want. From a packaging or modification perspective, it's not something that my team or I do. 

I'm not sure how many users are currently maintaining the product.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We are using the most recent version of the solution at this time.

The product is well-versed, and it's simple to use - which is why I would recommend it. You've just got to know how you're going to organize or structure everything. Whoever's basically managing or deploying the software needs to map it out. They should be able to modify or scale it to the way they want it, however. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities. The flexibility and the ability to modify what you want are great - and, on top of that, it's pretty simple. If you know how to do a simple query, you should be able to pull up anything that you want. That's what I like about this software

I use the solution primarily for IT Financial Management and IT Business Management.

In financial management, this platform has the infrastructure allowing us to expand the way we want to. For example, it gives you many business rules and budget models that you can use to optimize your workflow. It does not put you in a box. Additionally, integrating this solution with other platforms is extremely easy to do.

The asset management application could be improved. They have a lot of the infrastructure built, but it does not come with already made compatibility with some of the most popular vendors, such as Cisco and Microsoft. You have to fix it yourself.

If this solution wants to be a big player in the asset management field, they have to have tools to compete with competitors, such as Tanium, that have integration with Cisco and other vendors.

I have been using this solution for approximately 20 years.

I have not had any issue with the stability.

The scalability is excellent. We have approximately 600 people using this solution in our organization.

The technical support was excellent.

Previously I have used CapStone and Remedy.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price of this solution is expensive.

I have evaluated Tanium.

For those wanting to implement this solution, I would advise using an expert.

When using this solution you have to expect you will need to continuously optimize it to get the most out of it.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

The solution is used primarily to report incidents and then to follow up. It's mainly used for ticketing and incident resolution and tasks of that nature. I look at incidents and see the resolutions and report on that.

The solution is reasonably straightforward to use. The only thing I can say about it is, it presents me with the incidents that I've reported, so that's good. I don't have to look through a whole bunch of other incidents that aren't relevant to me. It's very useful in that sense.

The solution is very stable.

I find the way you need to attach things like screenshots and stuff is a bit gimmicky. I'm a casual user. I'll use it once every two months and only when I have an incident that I need to report. You don't get a lot of experience with it when you're just using it once in a while like that. Therefore, it needs to be more intuitive so that you don't have to re-learn how to do simple tasks as the way to do certain things just isn't obvious.

We've been using the solution for around two years now. It hasn't been that long.

The product is extremely stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. It has not been problematic at all.

I can't comment with authority, however, I would say we're a big company and there are probably lots of incidents and lots of demand for it across the company. I'm assuming it's pretty scalable.

We have around 5,000 employees in Canada. However, we're a multi-national. It may not be the case that all countries are on the same platform, however, internationally we have up to 100,000 employees.

it's used quite extensively in our company. On top of that, we are resellers, and we have many clients that we have implemented this for as well.

I've never dealt directly with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

I've talked a lot with our groups that implement ServiceNow, and I haven't talked to them specifically about what it's like, or what kind of support they get from ServiceNow when they're implementing. However, I would guess that it's reasonably good, as I suspect it would be a pain point for them if people complain more about things when they're not working due to the fact that it wasn't set up right.

Before the company implemented ServiceNow it was more of a conventional help desk where you as a customer would call in. They might've had a tracking system that they used, however, they didn't give it to us. The thing about ServiceNow is that you get the users to self-serve. We report our own incidents. They never used to do that before ServiceNow.

We have a team in-house that can handle implementation for clients.

I've looked into HEAT. I'm looking to evaluate it with Service Now.

I'm in consulting. I'm not in the group that does the ServiceNow implementation, however, we have people on staff who do it. We've implemented it in our company and I use it as a user, however, I'm not a guy who configures it.

I'd advise new users to get someone, such as a consultant, to help them implement the solution. I don't actually have enough knowledge about it to really give advice. My understanding is it's a good, solid system. In our company, people are quite bullish about it. The best general advice I could give is, if you're getting someone to help you implement it, make sure they're people who know their stuff. If people go for cheap and cheerful support in implementation, they can have problems.

I'd rate the product at a six out of ten. As a self-serve product, it's kind of the middle of the road compared to other online experiences you get as a consumer. It's pretty bare-bones.

We use this solution for incident management, change request management, and service request catalog. These are our three primary use cases.

Within our organization, there are roughly 15,000 to 20,000 employees using this solution. We have two staff members that handle all maintenance-related issues. 

As our mission over the next couple of years is acquisition, we definitely plan to increase our usage of this solution. 

We aligned several different service desks onto one platform. There is a cost savings in not maintaining multiple systems. 

I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets.

They could be more competitive with their licensing. We went to roll out asset management discovery and at the time they charge per network device only and you didn't get a price break until you were at 5k devices. To me, I would change the licensing to discovery of all devices. We made do with SCCM instead, but the limitation with using that is that we can only discovery over one domain. 

CreatorCon is an event for Servicenow customers to show off what they've done with the tool. Servicenow benefits because they can partner with the customer to make a solution a permanent solution in the tool. 

I have been using ServiceNow for 11 years. 

In the 11 years that we've been using it, it's not gone down more than once; and we started with just one help desk on it — we now have five.

If you get the right person, the technical support is pretty good. 

We used to use E-Service — it was horrible. 

Deployment took four weeks. 

A vendor helped us with the implementation. That made things pretty easy. 

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We normally end up doing a true-up payment because we tend to acquire more people and use more licenses.

Yes, Remedy (Salesforce), SysAid, Cherwell, TopDesk. Cherwell came in a close second. 

My advice is to use a third-party vendor to help with the installation. Keep in mind, some are good, some aren't. You would have to send your staff away for training for about six months before they could even attempt to implement this solution. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give ServiceNow a rating of nine. There's always room for improvement, but it's the Cadillac of ticketing systems.

Everything that I've done over the last six years with ServiceNow has been for hospital systems. It was used at different levels for different clients. Many times, it was being used by the whole organization, but my involvement has always been for the department projects. There was significant effort into reporting and dashboards and some automation for approvals. I am currently using its latest version.

Visibility and resource management are the two areas that are improved by the ServiceNow Project Management implementation. The Project Management module provides visibility to leadership. We are able to get accurate dashboards and, more importantly, proper resource management. A lot of this isn't necessarily ServiceNow functionality. It is also a matter of implementation and adoption process.

Before ServiceNow, in the environments I've been worked with, there were a bunch of files, such as Microsoft Project plans or Excel spreadsheets, all over the place, and very rarely anybody had a clear understanding of where we were in the project. By the time they had an understanding, the document used to become dated. 

Being able to have the required information for project management is valuable. I've got multiple people accessing it, and I'm tracking tasks with percentages done. It allows me to have detailed notes and provides the ability to attach documents. I have used a lot of project management solutions, and there were gaps in terms of what was available. ServiceNow has got all the features and functionalities.

It is a solid solution. It is also easy to get into and use. It is certainly highly scalable. 

The reporting, which also includes dashboards, needs to be improved. Both dashboards and reporting require subject matter experts. A lot of end-user configuration and functionality comes with ServiceNow and it is not bad, but when I want to do something slightly more sophisticated, I've got to get a ServiceNow subject matter expert to get those dashboards all set up. One of the big reasons why that's so difficult is that ServiceNow is effectively a whole bunch of databases, and almost every module is fundamentally a database, so pulling information from multiple modules is painful. The key thing here is the Time Tracking piece, which is rather important because that's what helps you automate the percentage done inline. Getting a report that shows combined information from Time Tracking and Project Management into a single view is difficult.

There should be the ability to turn on and off portions of Project Management. I'm not asking them to do a finance portion of Project Management through the interface. Currently, there are hundreds of fields that project managers are looking at and trying to decide whether they should fill them out or not. Being able to configure the user interface without a subject matter expert would be really great. 

When you want to get a little more value out of the product and pull data from multiple modules and do something that isn't built-in and is a user-configurable thing, it gets ugly. Currently, as soon as you install the new version, you've got to go back there and make all those tweaks. There should be just a configuration file that goes to the new version. When a new release comes out and I've tweaked it, I shouldn't have to go back and manually tweak everything again. 

When we look at ITSM pieces, there is a knowledge base that works really well. I feel that the Project Management module does not leverage the knowledge base the way it should. I don't think it needs to be a separate knowledge base. There should be links. Currently, if I am configuring a project and looking at a particular tab or field, and I want to know more details about that, there is no simple way other than to go into the knowledge base and do a search. There is no simple way for me to just click and see the approved knowledge base article about that particular tab or field. 

There is no built-in ability to get to these articles, and the customer would have to build it. All the stuff is in the knowledge base, but I am constantly required to go and do a search and find it. After that, I have to try and figure out if this is the approved one. Most knowledge bases are designed so that your end users can submit articles, at least successful ones. You've got to get the subject matter expertise into the knowledge articles, and there is a clear delineation between the ones that are approved versus the ones that work right. I want both types of articles in there, but I want to be able to delineate which ones are the approved ones and tie them in Project Management. This functionality is already there in some other areas, but it is not there in Project Management. Not being able to link that knowledge base in a more fluid way is a big miss because it just makes adoption much harder.

Resource management should be easier. This is an area where I would love to see an improvement. The nature of ServiceNow is that it tends to be a bunch of fields. It is a bit like an Excel spreadsheet. You're in a software interface, but you've got a bunch of rows and columns. Other than dashboards, there are a lot of rows and columns views that often do not help you to easily see and manage resources. More graphical and more click-and-drag ability around resource management would be really good. The data is in there, and you can run dashboards, reports, and stuff like that, and very often, get the information in a somewhat consumable view. However, it tends to have frozen columns. It would be amazing if they can make resource management a little bit more graphical. There are other solutions that I've seen where resource management was a more visual experience.

I have been using this solution for six years.

From a perspective of it working, there are bugs occasionally, but for the most part, it is very solid. There are always pockets of problems, but when it comes to Project Management, I am yet to see a significant bug or issue. Most of the bugs and issues are more related to a lack of functionality as opposed to something that is broken or bad data. All such functionalities get added in the next version. 

From the perspective of doing what it is supposed to do, it is very solid. My experience has been very good, especially with the most recent release.

It is highly scalable. Once you get over the initial pricing shock, you can have multiple people in there, and you can scale quickly and easily. It is one of those things where you get a better price for more people and most subscription licenses. Technically, it can scale up, but it starts getting expensive.

In the current environment, they have licenses for 180 people who are actively using the Project Management module. They have 30,000 end users, and their users have view-only access to Project Management. Once it is stable, and they are completely comfortable with it, which may be a year or longer, they might potentially expand it to the entire environment. They have 30,000 people in the US, and they also have health systems in South America. So, the total number of users could be between 50,000 to 60,000. Going to South America would probably be two to three years out.

I've got a lot of experience with ServiceNow outside of the Project Management module. Focusing just on the Project Management module, my experiences have been very good. ServiceNow, at least for this particular module, has been smart and only tends to let you get on the phone with somebody who really knows the product. There are not that many support calls typically, and they tend to be just the technical staff that are supporting the module. While you can have end-user support, I've not worked with many customers who buy the support for the Project Management module for anybody who is not actively using it as a project manager, and even those project managers usually rely on the core administrator team. They'll tell them what the problem is, and that core team will call support.

When I've been on the calls with support, which I have done on a regular basis over the last couple of years and certainly with this current customer, I've been very pleased with their knowledge. These are highly technical calls, and it is not what I would call typical support. It is definitely the third-tier support that we are calling and getting, and my experience has been extremely good for the Project Management module.

I've definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow. Some of them were homegrown, and some of them were built into the electronic medical record solution that was there. 

The current customer I'm working for didn't make a switch. They had made that decision and gone to ServiceNow four years ago. They adopted Project Management probably two years ago. It seemed very logical to go ahead and switch over to ServiceNow Project Management because people were already logging into ServiceNow. About a year ago, in fact, right about the time when COVID hit us, they actually finished the implementation. There have been some hits and misses because the staff resigned and things like that. 

Other customers that I've worked for had either Microsoft Project files or Excel spreadsheets. Many times, they also had a web-based project management solution that literally was a task list with a percent complete and literally four fields per task, and those would be stacked in. A lot of these were more team management solutions such as Microsoft Office 365. None of them is a competitor to what you get from ServiceNow.

It is overly complex mainly because it has a lot of content. There are some out-of-the-box configurations, and there is also a lot of content that is not configurable out of the box. Of course, most organizations aren't mature enough to use the additional content and additional tabs. Typically, the implementers are smart enough to deal with that, but I've worked with customers that weren't smart enough to go ahead and say, "Hey, we need a subject matter expert to come in and install this module." Sometimes, they brought somebody in to do just the bare bone install, and then they wanted to configure it themselves. 

You need a subject matter expert. ServiceNow doesn't always do it, and very often, it is third parties who implement it, but they don't do a great job of educating their customer on what they should and shouldn't do as their initial install. They just say here is the tool to some extent. You should ideally go for subject matter experts that are either recommended by ServiceNow or are directly from ServiceNow. Of course, it gets more expensive as you go up that chain.

ServiceNow could do a better job of prepping their coordinators and supporting this process. It is tough because most of the customers first need training on project management in general before you start teaching them how to use the tool. There is no lack of support. It is just not well-organized and prioritized support. There is a knowledge article for everything from ServiceNow, and all the information is there, but it is not organized in a way, especially for a new user, to say that don't worry about this. We'll get to this later. Here are the things you should worry about, and here are the things that you really should do as best practice. That's the key.

I have been advising and working with implementation teams over the last three years. Every single time, after they implemented and started using it, they started to discover things that they wish they'd known beforehand. That's why it would be good to have an organized set of best practices from ServiceNow saying, "Hey, you're implementing. This is new. You don't have a mature organization that has a bunch of requirements. So, here are the minimum out-of-the-box things that you should enable. We're also going to hide all that stuff that you don't need, and we're going to get these fundamentals working." Guided and organized best practices for organizations that are new to project management would be a huge win for ServiceNow.

It is a cloud product, so it requires just configuration from us. Typically, implementation takes two to three months, which includes all the beforehand and after closeout. You have some meetings, make some agreements, install the product, and get it up and running. Installation would take just two to three weeks, and the implementation would take two to three months because you've got to do training and everything else to truly get it in there. Most organizations also end up having to come back and do remediation that takes an additional three to six months. We're not talking about the setup where everybody is working on it. We're talking about a setup where you've got a small team that is typically working on the issues, coming up with solutions, and then implementing them later. There is usually a three-month to six-month clean-up afterward. It's not uncommon for me to see close to a full year from the first conversation to when they feel like they've got stable, usable, and good reporting coming out of the solution.

It was a company recommended by ServiceNow. ServiceNow has got a top-six list, and this was number two on their list. In terms of knowledge and the ability to solve problems, they were very good. Because there are no organized best practices and things like that from ServiceNow to help customers in avoiding mistakes, I've not seen an implementor that does it properly. I am constantly trying to help, but, of course, you also typically have that executive that just wants to get it slammed in. This is because they think that with the tools in place, things will suddenly get better. However, good technology rarely results in good results. You've got to have adoption in order to have good results.

While I'm certainly complaining about some deficiencies, I have been very pleased with this implementor's ability to come in, implement, explain, tweak, and get things right. I have been very pleased with what they do. Deficiencies are more typical of all of the implementers, including ServiceNow.

In terms of maintenance, I have not worked too closely with the PMO staff that does that, but as I understand it, they've got four people. Two are directly involved, and two are more along the lines of training and support. There are really four roles for them. There is one role of subject matter experts who are constantly looking at what functionality is in use and for which functionality they want to start adopting. They look at what can we do with the Project Management tool. They also create a lot of dashboards and reports. The end-user functionality is very powerful, but when you want a dashboard that starts grabbing things from multiple places, it is not easy. They spend a fair amount of time doing that kind of work. They also provide support and spend a fair amount of time troubleshooting the data, which isn't because the product isn't working correctly. It is because the users aren't correctly using it. They also simply look at the data for management. They kind of audit the data to see that what we know and what we're hearing in the status update meetings matches what's in the tool. When it doesn't match, they audit the content and figure out whether there is a problem. All four of them probably spend at least 30% or 40% of their time doing that audit process, sitting in meetings, hearing what's going on, looking at the status reports, matching those up with what's in the tool, and making sure that it matches.

That's a tough call. I would say yes, but I don't think that many of the customers are calculating or tracking that sort of thing. From my perspective, when we say the return on investment, a lot of times we're talking about hard dollars and being able to readily show that my expenses were reduced. The return on investment for most of the project management solutions is improved performance in project management, and therefore, it is a bit of a soft cost saving because of the improved efficiency and ability to deliver projects. That's usually where ROI is seen, and it is tough to make that a metric.

I'm not aware of any additional costs. I'm pretty sure that the current client is paying just the licensing fee per user. I do know that they've got some support agreement with ServiceNow, but I don't think that is broken out or specific to Project Management. It is just inclusive.

I certainly would recommend it on a regular basis as a viable scalable project management solution. It is a solid solution. It has got all the features and functionalities I want. The lack of visualization of data, ease of implementation, and ease of configuration results in difficulty in training people, and it needs to be more visual and a little bit easier to configure and maintain. Currently, as soon as you install the new version, you've got to go back there and make all those tweaks. It is not all or nothing sort of thing. It is just a case of how much of the functionality done in a manual way has to be redone in each update. That could change over time. They're constantly improving how this works, but in my experience, that was very much the case for the last two upgrades that I've done. Occasionally, I've had problems where existing data from a prior version did not migrate. There is some wonkiness, and you got to go in and clean things up a little bit, but it is pretty minor. It is one of those things where when you've got a solution like ServiceNow that every single person in the organization is using, and you do the update the next morning and realize that none of your reports are right because you've tweaked it, and now, you have to go and fix it. In fairness, if you only use it out of the box the way ServiceNow says you should use Project Management, it probably wouldn't be an issue, but I am yet to see a customer use ServiceNow Project Management out of the box with no changes.

Comparing it to all other project management solutions without consideration of cost, I would rate ServiceNow a seven out of ten.

Primarily, we use it for our service desk and IT help desk ticketing. We also have the PPM module. ServiceNow is our main PPM platform at the moment. We use the Idea Portal for project requests, and we are also in the process of installing the financial module. We're using the latest version of ServiceNow.

It has improved the way in which projects are requested and assessed. We used to have two forms that PMs used to send out. We had a committee that would say yes or no and allocate the resources and the time for the project. PMs used to bring the forms, and I used to go through them with the committee. With the Demand process, we have been able to automate that. We now have what is called a Demand Pipeline. PMs still come and present at the committee, but everything is easier to track now and automated. We go through the process of the demand and then turn it into a project, which I find very useful, at least on my end.

It does exactly what I need it to do. I report to the CIO and senior managers for the overall projects. It is great for me because I can show them fancy graphics and makes my life easy.

The Idea Portal and the PPM platform are most valuable. Their out-of-the-box dashboards and reporting are fantastic. I use them almost on a weekly basis. I have developed a couple of PMO dashboards for reporting.

It is user-friendly. Everything is done through a navigation bar, and it makes things a lot easier that way.

They can maybe improve the area of agile project management. They do have user storyboards and other things, but we kind of lean on Jira for that work. This is perhaps an area that could be looked at a little more.

I have been using this solution for about two years. 

It is a great product. I haven't had any issues with it so far, and it has been working well.

It has been really good for us. For portfolio and program management, which is my area, ServiceNow is my go-to place. It is only the agile module that people aren't using as much because they're used to Jira. We kind of allow our project managers to use whichever product they want for their project management.

We are adding modules as we proceed. The financial module is coming soon. We already have the Service Portal deployed, which is being used. We are also looking at doing a service catalog type of thing.

We are a large organization, but ServiceNow is mostly being used by our IT. Our user base is around 300. We have one admin.

I haven't interacted with them.

We used to use Planview, and we moved to ServiceNow to incorporate one platform for everything. It also made a lot of sense financially. We were at the end of our contract, so we decided to go for a new solution. It took us some time to deploy it, but overall, it works better for us. It has good metrics.

It was pretty straightforward. It took about three months. We had to migrate our former projects from Planview PPM. It wasn't hard. We just had to make sure that everything was in there.

We worked with a third-party company to get things set up, and they were experts in those areas. They were fantastic.

On the PPM side, I am quite satisfied with what is there. Apart from submitting tickets, I haven't used the ticketing system to its full functionality, so I can't really comment on that. We are quite satisfied with the tool. Its out-of-box reporting is quite balanced. We didn't require much customization when we deployed it. We did some customization, but we tried to stay out of the box as much as possible to make things easier for us. It has been working really great out of the box.

If you have no experience in using it and if you are just deploying it, not migrating from another solution, it should be pretty straightforward. With a little bit of training and help from ServiceNow, it should be up and running in a couple of days. If you are doing a large-scale migration, as we did, I would probably recommend using a third-party contractor.

I would rate ServiceNow a ten out of ten.