The importance of creating and maintaining a successful platform management strategy
Updated: 10th May, 2024
At Unifii, we are lucky to work with incredible customers and some genuinely inspiring leaders within the tech space. They all understand the importance of leveraging people’s talents and time in order to achieve the best possible outcomes for their business.
One of the things we see that sets leading organisations apart from others is how they develop their platform management strategy, so that ServiceNow is at the heart of their business growth. Often, a strong concern for these enterprises is how to balance resource availability with their business demand for further utilising ServiceNow. Many customers’ ServiceNow projects came around because their incumbent tools (be they IT, customer-facing or employee workflow-based) had a chronic lack of focus over several years. As a result, these organisations have had to invest the time, effort and expense on a transformation project in order to get back onto a solid footing.
How can you avoid this happening to your business?
It’s imperative that your business model includes a plan for keeping your ServiceNow platform relevant and dynamic. By maintaining a solid and consistent focus on the health of your instance, the ever-evolving requirements of your various stakeholders will be consistently supported.
Unifii offer a range of platform management services that can aid you with this. On the surface, this can seem like a daunting area to delve in to, which is why we aim to keep our approach as straightforward as possible.
A fresh perspective on support
Unifii’s approach to platform management focuses on more than just the technical aspects. We think that supporting customers with their platform governance and ownership is just as important as assisting with their technical needs.
Our key services can be fundamentally broken down into the following categories:
Technical Services
Governance Services
Platform Support (L1/L2)
Platform Manager
Platform Engineering
Architecture
Platform Testing
Business Analysis
Platform Upgrades
Product Specialist
Product Specialists
Support themes on the rise
As mentioned earlier, an ongoing review of your ServiceNow platform is crucial to its long-term health. Your team need to be mindful of anything that’s coming down the line over the next 3-6 months (because there’s always something) - when is the next release or upgrade? Is your business expanding, and if so, how fast? Are your current processes compatible with your workload demand? Is your current ServiceNow licensing aligned to your business needs? Are you maximising the value of what you’ve already bought?
A growing area of interest is our product specialist service. This service is targeted at ServiceNow products that require a hybrid of ServiceNow technical knowledge and business knowledge. We are increasingly seeing customers looking for ongoing thought leadership and technical support, as a combined package, to increase value. The service is especially focused on several IT product suites, including Software Asset Management Professional, SAM Pro, and the IT Operations Management suite. The purpose of this is so that you can continue to evolve your internal technical patterns, therefore keeping up to date with the changing business landscape.
Unifii also offer a Platform Architecture Service, where businesses receive architectural support and leadership. We work with your internal stakeholders to define and maintain a 12-month, forward-looking roadmap plan for your ServiceNow experience; we then look to involve your suppliers and any third parties to make sure the roadmap is accurately aligned to your business objectives. Having such a capability available on a part time basis gives our customers the comfort of planning for the future, whilst ensuring they are building strong foundations today.
Ultimately, investing in Platform Management is invaluable when looking at your current and future relationship with ServiceNow. This is true no matter the approach you take; your product manager needs to fully understand the long-term strategic vision of your platform. Not having this understanding could be detrimental in the long-run - Unifii can help you avoid being in this position.
For more information and a free consultation on how we could potentially help, please reach out to one of the team here.