Must Read Before Go-Live

When we first went live, I thought the benefits would show themselves. Tickets would move faster, self-service would take off, and leadership would see the return. That never happened. Value doesn’t prove itself. You have to plan for it, measure it properly, and keep the story alive.

Plan for Value
The biggest miss was not setting a baseline. Without a “before” picture there’s no proof of progress. Metrics like MTTR, call deflection or satisfaction need to be captured before go-live and tracked afterwards. 

Even when the numbers are awkward, they give you a story to build on. Baseline, measure and make sure the results drive action.

Success Dashboards
Dashboards aren’t decoration, they are how leadership read the platform. ServiceNow has out-of-the-box dashboards that highlight benchmarks and deflection, the measures that really resonate in the boardroom. Too often the focus is on SLA compliance. The real story is how you perform against peers and how much demand you are taking out of the system.

Impact Is an Opportunity
Reporting only on process compliance meant nobody outside IT paid attention. When we switched to impact — hours saved, calls avoided, downtime reduced — the conversation changed completely. Framing ServiceNow as a driver of outcomes rather than just a workflow tool put it on the business agenda.

Pro Tip: KPI Composer
If your measures are scattered across reports, KPI Composer ties them into a single narrative. Few people use it but it is an effective way to show how metrics connect to the bigger picture.

Closing Thought
I learned most of these by getting them wrong the first time. Value will not prove itself. The teams that succeed are the ones that link their metrics to action and keep the value story alive long after go-live.