ServiceNow Reviews

I implement ServiceNow for our customers. I'm a reseller and we are partners of ServiceNow. I'm the company business developer.

From my point of view, it's the best solution in the market. It's so easy to implement, the ratio of days to implement is the lowest in the market; I can respond to all the needs of my clients. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the best solution.

The price is a huge barrier in the Portugese market when it comes to implementing ServiceNow.

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

Technical support is the best because they respond quickly. They have good SLAs to respond to our tickets with the correct priorities, it's very well defined. Compared with other suppliers, it's fantastic.

The initial setup is very easy. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the easiest solution to implement.

Licensing costs are the highest in the market. It's difficult to sell in Portugal, but for the rest of Europe, it's easy to sell because we can easily justify the value that the customer will gain from the product.

It's important to understand all the components of the solution. After that, with the base knowledge, it's easy to implement. It also helps to have some knowledge about processes based on the ITIL and ISO 20000. It's most important to become familiar with that to implement the solution.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

I like that in ServiceNow creating workflows is simpler than that in HP Service Manager. Also, I really like the customization feature. It allows us to customize the service portal and permits us to do a lot of customization per business needs.

It covers all the modules regarding ITSM, IT asset management, and customer service as well. That is, all modules are covered in the same platform.

It is very user friendly, and I've enjoyed using the dashboard and user interface.

Technical support is great, and a lot of documentation is available on Google.

There is a need to learn scripting because as in the case of all the ITSM tools, scripting is needed for customization. If you're not very comfortable with scripting, then you may feel that you cannot do everything in ServiceNow without learning scripting.

The licensing costs are high for companies in Tunisia.

I've been using the open source version for almost two years.

I have found it to be a stable, reliable solution.

I have discovered a lot of support and a lot of documentation on Google. So the information is always available.

Sometimes, I have opened a ticket to ask participants in the community, and I have always got an answer from support.

The initial setup is not complex.

In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive.

I would recommend this solution because it's a very well performing solution. As a result, I would rate ServiceNow at ten on a scale from one to ten.

One of the benefits of the platform itself is that it's not covering IT service management only. It, for example, has price service management functionality. 

There are lots of modules around IT service management such as IT business management and human resource management (HRC). Bigger clients, enterprises, are often looking for end-to-end business flow automation. Part of those processes, in other cases, are standalone solutions. The ability to implement end-to-end flows, including business ones, is the most important aspect of the solution.

I sometimes try to compare ServiceNow with Micro Focus. When I worked with Micro Focus or HPE, I liked how they communicate with partners, how they provide materials. ServiceNow really does lots of things in this area, however, there is definitely some space for improvement there. For instance, some workshop materials, et cetera, are lacking. They need to be providing vendors and implementation partners with materials and guidance on implementation.

The solution is mostly on the cloud. On-premises implementations are more difficult. 

I've been using ServiceNow for the last five years. I remember my first implementation project was in 2017. Probably before that, I started using ServiceNow and did the training, et cetera.

The stability is pretty good. On average, I don't see many clients complaining about the performance side of stability or availability on the platform.

We did some cases to improve server functionality with scaling. We created clusters. In terms of the scalability of ServiceNow itself, several instances of ServiceNow with synchronization, et cetera, as well as performance, I don't recall scaling so much. In most cases, it's not really required as one instance of ServiceNow is good enough for most clients. They also handle all this backup, monitoring, and et cetera, internally. 

I rarely deal with technical support, as, most often at least, I focus our innovation on implementation projects. Support is more active when it's implemented already and rolled out to production. Other personnel from my department handle that, for sure. From my understanding, in terms of the quality of the support,  it's quite typical. Sometimes it could be better and faster. However, if we can imagine the flow of those tickets for the ServiceNow support side, I would imagine it's quite big. Therefore, I'd say that it's acceptable and understandable.

I also work with Atlassian's Jira Service Desk. I used to work with Service Manager five years ago.

For ServiceNow, I really like it's a single platform. Everything within the platform is integrated already. There are quite rich integration capabilities with other systems at the client-side. For Micro Focus, you can install it in the cloud or on-premises. ServiceNow doesn't really allow you to install anything on-premises. 

On the Micro Focus side, some of their products were really great, such as Universal CMDB or UCMDB. At some point, it's still better than the current ServiceNow CMDB. Some single individual products from Micro Focus were really great for me. However, in some cases, when you come into a client and try to solve a complex task, you need to map the requirements to particular products. For Micro Focus, sometimes it was problematic as you required many products solving more or less the same purposes. At ServiceNow, each module is quite unique and serving its unique purpose. It's more like LEGOs. 

With Micro Focus, I remember in some cases, their solutions were quite resource-consuming. It's pretty predictable since HPE at the time was both a software and hardware vendor. It was good for them to sell software plus hardware. Sometimes it was how to understand why particular software could consume so many resources. That's not a problem with ServiceNow at all as it's on the cloud mostly.

The initial setup is pretty clear. If we try to compare the implementation of some traditional modules, like incident management, request fulfillment, it's an industry standard. It's very good. ServiceNow, from a functionality and partner support perspective, has lots of materials. However, when it comes to some newer modules, some ITBM applications, et cetera, sometimes when they just release the first version of the module, and it might be a bit different from a functionality perspective. There's a lack of documentation and support. That's quite typical. I feel like Hewlett-Packard pays a bit more attention to that.

We're implementors. We implement the solution for our clients.

ServiceNow is still mostly used as an ITSM platform. And IT service management mostly feeds some kind of internal purposes. It's not a business-related platform. It's supposed to save money, not to help to earn money.

Some clients come in to get some help with the reimplementation of a platform. Others are looking for certain improvements to the existing platform. In some cases, it's a greenfield implementation. For greenfield implementations, especially when it comes to big enterprises, the question behind the scenes is we don't really understand how much we spend on IT. There are likely many unrelated budgets, which are not even visible. The first question is how much you really spend. And if they get an answer to this question, it's already a good achievement. 

Over time, we baseline the spending and we implement new functionality and new processes, new modules. In some cases, it's quite expensive compared to the business itself. By that, I mean, the processes we implement. We may have 20 people doing some job and if you look at their salaries for a couple of years, it's a lot. We come in and implement and automate the process for them, and in those cases, it might be five years of salaried budget saved. However, that's years. You won't see the savings immediately. It will be something witnessed over time.

We're a ServiceNow partner. We help to implement ServiceNow for our clients.

We're working on likely the latest version of the solution. ServiceNow provides upgrades two times a year. Previous versions get obsolete so that you can't actually use them.

I often see that people tend to simplify things and they expect any system, no matter if it's ServiceNow or any other system or platform from the area, that the implementation would solve the entire ATSM matter. However, in fact, with ATSM, it's about products, people, processes, and partners. All the efforts should be covered. No solution is a silver bullet.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. it's a very good solution, however, there's always room for improvement.

We primarily use the solution in a variety of ways, including the NOW platform (CMDB, Workflows, Service Portal, Service Catalog, Reporting), Custom AppDev, SecOps (Vulnerability Response with Tenable integration and Security Incident Response), Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC), IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Asset Management (ITAM), IT Operations Management (Service Mapping, Discovery, Event Management), IT Business Management (including Project Portfolio Management (PPM)), HR Service Delivery (HRSD), Software Asset Management (SAM), and Facilities Service Management (FSM).

We can now transform operations from excel spreadsheets and emails to a central system of record/truth. ServiceNow can either replace or integrate with a prospect/customer's existing solutions - especially if such integrations are common.

ServiceNow ensures a customer's investment by having 2 releases per year.  Prospect/customers considering implementing or expanding its ServiceNow investment should enlist the help of ServiceNow partners to support their effort throughout their journey.

ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI. 

The platform (PaaS) is a low-code/no-code platform on a secure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS - Government Cloud Computing environment (GCC)), with a single data model and a single system of record. Its applications (SaaS) can easily be extended with workflows and other built-in APIs together with the ServiceNow Integration Hub and other applications available on the ServiceNow Store. The platform is very flexible and built to be integrated.  

ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.

I have no further information to add to this, however, there is much more information offered by Forester, Gartner, and ServiceNow to augment this input.  

We are a ServiceNow partner, as well as Salesforce and other cloud-based IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS transformative solutions, and have been for over 10 years. Often, we are engaged with our customers for years, helping to build roadmaps that allow them to expand their solutions over time because resources are limited and organizational change management takes time.

Like all other IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS subscription cloud providers, ServiceNow is constantly improving by building new capabilities to expand the breadth and depth of its offerings while increasing its activities with partners to build more capabilities. As ServiceNow and its partners/customers expand the capabilities, I see new vertical applications being created (currently underway for TELCO and other industries). Stay tuned for more updates that not only provide new capabilities but also enhance existing ones.

I've been implementing ServiceNow for over 5 years for various clients.

The solution has excellent stability and we're working with a client that has one of the largest implementations of ITSM and SecOps in the world.

The solution offers excellent scalability. For example, currently, we are working with a client that has one of the largest implementations of ITSM and SecOps in the world.

The product offers excellent support.

Yes, the process is straightforward, but using an experienced services firm is best - especially if implementing the product for the first time.

CoreSphere, LLC - CSAT scores are published on the ServiceNow partner page. Other are reviews completed in the US Federal government's Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARs).

The ROI a company can get depends on the customer and the investment.

We use it for interim problem change configuration, regress management, and knowledge management.

I've found a lot of pros with ServiceNow. The user interface and the feasibility to modify the GUI are great features.

It is easily configurable and has a good developer society online, available for any issues from the backend.

On the front end, we have good workflow management, ease of work, and ease of business. It helps us to translate the business requirements and technical requirements in an easier manner.

One of the best things is the reporting; I like how you can manage the data and present it.

ServiceNow is also stable and scalable, and has good technical support.

Vulnerability management could be improved. Also, integration with tools such as Microsoft Defender ATP needs improvement.

The price is on the higher end.

I've been using it for four years.

In the last four years, we might have had an outage, but the stability is very good. Since it's cloud-based, we don't see many performance issues.

Scalability wise, we added one more module for the vulnerability response, and we have not faced any issues.

We are happy with where we are, but we are adding on a few things. Whenever there's a new requirement that comes up, we plan to move away from the manual work, and we try to do everything in ServiceNow.

We have two types of users: the idea user who actually works on the solution and the requester who raises the request. In total, the end users that have access to raise the tickets are around 13,000 plus, and those who actually work on the solution, designing, working on the tickets, etc., are in total around 300 plus.

The technical support is good. They're responsive, and they keep a tab on whatever issues we are facing. They have a dedicated team that handles them and even a dedicated portal where you can raise tickets and flag them.

I was using Remedy and HP Service Manager. We switched because of ServiceNow's scalability, stability, and the user interface. I believe that the business mindset of whoever created or expanded ServiceNow was to make sure that we have a good developer community with an open system for people to understand and expand their knowledge, a better UI, and better workflow management, which I did not see in Remedy. 

Remedy has a lot of constraints; the integration and referencing had issues. ServiceNow has an option of referencing many tables in one form, but that was not available in Remedy. Also, Remedy was not that scalable.

We needed a person to have good technical knowledge to consider the system, but with ServiceNow, you don't need technical knowledge; they have made everything UI. So, that's a good thing.

The cost might be on the higher side, but the services were better, so we chose ServiceNow.

The initial setup was straightforward. They have out of the box solutions readily available, so if you're just going by the out of the box configuration, it might take a few months. Maybe a 12 week period is good enough to get it up and running.

We got the ServiceNow vendor team to help us with the initial setup.

Overall, I have seen a substantial ROI when it comes to reporting: a faster response and also the assignment of tickets. If you have to talk to your leadership and tell them what the status of a particular project is, you can create your own dashboards, which will give them a glimpse of everything in one go. They won't have to talk to you every time; they can just open it up.

The second ROI is that you don't have to log into ServiceNow every time; you can integrate ServiceNow with teams, Microsoft teams, or any other tool, and you will get the notifications over there itself. It saves a lot of time from that perspective.

The licensing is on a yearly basis. The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified.

When you buy the license, it also comes with the yearly tech support. So, you don't have any additional costs per se.

We moved away from HPSM to ServiceNow, and we evaluated Remedy.

They have a lot of libraries available online. If you are planning to implement ServiceNow, you should first compare your current system with the online free developer instance from ServiceNow, which has all the features that are present in the licensed versions.

I would suggest that you see if the added business is supported in ServiceNow so that when you implement the system, you can raise these special issues with the consultants.

You should go ahead and create your own instances and see whether the system is working as expected and whether it suits your requirements. When you're implementing, make sure that you implement everything and don't leave parts for your own team to handle. Get everything done by the vendor in the first go.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate ServiceNow at 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 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.