service-mapping-readiness.pptx

Deliver a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services it
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Implementation readiness checklist:
Service Mapping

2 © 2021 ServiceNow, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
Service Mapping implementation readiness checklist
To map your services with ServiceNow, you'll need two solutions: ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping. The visibility provided by these solutions gives you valuable planning and
diagnostic assistance. This will help you understand how your business is impacted by asset moves and replacements, unplanned outages, and migration to the cloud. This implementation
readiness checklist focuses on how to prepare to implement Service Mapping, assuming that you already have CMDB and ServiceNow Discovery in place.
The benefits of using a readiness checklist are:
 You’ll implement and see value faster
 You’ll be aware of the key implementation risks and how to avoid them
 You’ll have a superior, more efficient design (part of the Prepare phase below) so you get the most value from your Service Mapping implementation
The Now Create methodology described in the appendix is a proven methodology developed from thousands of ServiceNow implementations. It’s the recommended approach to
implementation. This checklist provides actions for the Initiate phase and helps you get ready for the Plan phase. It does not provide activities to complete the Plan, Execute, Deliver, or Close
phases but these phases are improved and expedited by this checklist. Include the activities for the Plan, Execute, Deliver, and Close phases in your implementation project plan.

Key risks to implementation success
Common problem (risks) Impact Correction
Lack of adoption leadership Poor communication; misaligned expectations; poor adoption;
organizational dissent; conflicting priorities; scope creep;
requirements churn; and comprised results
Make sure you have a structured and active implementation
leadership framework in place.
Lack of organizational sponsorship Poor communication; moving expectations; missed expectation;
organizational opt out; conflicting priorities; scope creep;
requirements churn; comprised results
Make sure that all affected organizations are onboarded at the start
of the implementation and understand and share the vision.
Managing scope of capability Project is seen as a technology project that doesn’t require
process change; capabilities are introduced without a clear link
to value—sometimes for capability’s sake; conflicting priorities;
scope creep; requirements churn; compromised results; long
implementation timelines
Develop a clear value strategy that all stakeholders diligently adhere
to and that delivers clear, measurable value incrementally.
Executives and stakeholders must keep a close eye on the
capability’s scope to make sure it is balanced with the organization’s
capacity to change.
Over-engineered processes Processes are adopted for process’s sake or to a level of
granularity that impacts usability; the trade-off between process
rigor and value is not kept in balance; user opts out;
compromised results
Only follow processes if they demonstrate value and your
organization can adopt them. When your approach allows for
processes to be refined and tightened, your organization is more
likely to adopt the changes and see the impact they make.

Intended use
How you should use this checklist depends on the status of your Service Mapping implementation project plan:
1. If you have a scoped project plan from ServiceNow Expert Services or a ServiceNow certified partner – This checklist helps you align with the ServiceNow best practices that will expedite
readiness and enhance the design phase. Use it in addition to the recommendations provided by ServiceNow Expert Services or the ServiceNow certified partner that created your
project plan.
2. If you don’t have an implementation project plan yet but are interested in what you need to prepare – This checklist highlights the standard steps to prepare for implementation, outlines
the design phase homework, and gives you insight into some of the major decisions you’ll make during implementation design. It also supports estimating the implementation effort
and timeline (with a ServiceNow expert). If you’re in the process of scoping an implementation with an external services provider, use this checklist to make sure you’ve considered the
best practices.
3. If you’re self-implementing – This checklist is for readiness only and doesn’t provide design, configuration, or testing activities. Work with ServiceNow experts with advanced knowledge
of ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) processes and technical properties, including CMDB, Discovery and Service Mapping, to plan your implementation and execution. If
you don’t have this expertise internally, we recommend a ServiceNow certified partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for planning and assistance with execution.
Who should read this?
The action items in this checklist are intended for the implementation owner, who can be a primary business stakeholder, project manager, or other stakeholder who manages the project
management and decision-making processes on the customer side. They don’t have to be a decision-maker but are responsible to make sure decisions are made and executed.
Note: If you’ve already completed some of the activities on this checklist (such as defining your business objectives), skip those activities but document them.
Key readiness steps
4. Create structure
for governance
1. Confirm
prerequisites
3. Assess your team
readiness
2. Define vision,
objectives and success
5. Plan for OCM
activities
6. Plan for
implementation
design

Checklist: Prepare to implement Service Mapping
Step 1: Confirm the prerequisites
See slide 6–7 to complete this step.
⎕Review Service Mapping features and functionality.
⎕Consider what other capabilities you need to ensure value from Service Mapping.
⎕Make sure Discovery is set up and that your CMDB is ready for Service Mapping.
⎕Plan to define your services before mapping them.
Step 2: Define your vision, objectives, and success
See slide 8 to complete this step.
⎕Define your vision, business objectives, and measures of success.
⎕Agree on the scope of your Service Mapping implementation.
Step 3: Assess your team’s readiness
⎕Confirm your implementation and maintenance resources.
⎕Identify requirements to discover service assets.
Step 4: Create a structure for governance
⎕Create an implementation governance committee.
⎕Establish a technical governance subcommittee.
Step 5: Plan for OCM activities
⎕Build an OCM plan.
⎕Plan for a pilot.
Step 6: Plan for implementation design
⎕Understand your technical environment.
⎕Get a deeper understanding of the services you intend to map during
implementation.
⎕Learn more about how Service Mapping is implemented so you are prepared
to participate in design phase workshops.

Step 1a: Review features and functionality
Take the time to understand ITOM Service Mapping capabilities and features and consider what other capabilities will be needed to get expected value from your Service Mapping
implementation.
Review Service Mapping features and functionality
• Read the Service Mapping overview on the ServiceNow website. Take note of
the application’s features, functionality, and benefits.
• Read the Service Mapping product docs. These resources are more technical
and provide additional functionality detail.
• Read the ITOM Visibility product docs to familiarize with how Service
Mapping works with CMDB and Discovery to deliver a unified, connected
view of your entire IT network and the services it supports.
• Review Now Community posts and Q&A on Service Mapping.
• Review the Service Mapping Release Notes for the latest ServiceNow release.
Practitioner insight: The most common use case for Service Mapping is to create a
service-aware CMDB—a CMDB that associates CIs with the services they support—to
support IT service management. Delivering a service-aware CMDB requires a
foundational CMDB that is kept up to date by optimized Discovery capabilities and
Service Mapping.
Consider what other capabilities you need to ensure value from Service Mapping
• Consider your use cases for Service Mapping (if you haven’t already determined them). You
don’t have to confirm all use cases until the design or Prepare phase (Now Create, see slide 2)
but get an idea of how you want to use Service Mapping.
• Confirm that foundational ServiceNow capabilities are already deployed and in use. The most
common underlying ServiceNow applications used with Service Mapping are CMDB, Discovery,
Dashboards, Reporting, and various ITSM capabilities.
• The applications your Service Mapping implementation needs to interact with are based
on your use cases. If you’re unsure which applications you need for your use of Service
Mapping, you’ll discover them during the design phase before configuration.
• If you identify an application that you need to deploy before implementing Service
Mapping, take this into account during the design phase so the application(s) you need
can be designed, configured, and in production before you use Service Mapping.
• Confirm that the foundational ServiceNow capabilities you need to support Service Mapping
(listed above) are on the Orlando release (or later) or will be on the Orlando release when you
begin implementation. If you need them, check out these resources for upgrading.

Step 1b: Confirm the prerequisites for Service Mapping
Make sure that Discovery is set up and that your CMDB is ready for Service Mapping
Before you can create a single service map, you need a CMDB that provides reliable, up-to-date
configuration data for all applications and assets related to the services you need to map.
• If you have not yet implemented CMDB, use this resource to plan your successful CMDB
deployment.
• After deploying your CMDB, refer to our playbook on populating and maintaining your CMDB
with ServiceNow Discovery to learn how to use ServiceNow Discovery to create the CIs that
you need to map out your services.
• Before continuing with Service Mapping, make sure you can:
• Run horizontal asset discovery using ServiceNow Discovery
• Match all the CI classes being imported with those found with Discovery
• Identify duplicate CI records and resolve them with your CMDB
• Configure credentials, users, and user permissions to let Service Mapping access and discover
applications inside your organization’s private network.
Service Mapping depends on access to reliable configuration data for physical and virtual servers, computers, routers, switches, applications, cloud instances, and more. You need an
updated configuration management database (CMDB) at all times. To implement Service Mapping, you will also need foundational service definition to inform what CIs need to be
related (mapped) to each service.
Make sure that services are defined well enough to be mapped
Service Mapping is simplest for services that are already well defined. Think
about what services are within the scope of your Service Mapping
implementation. Are they clearly defined? Is there a service owner that can help
you identify what CIs should be mapped to their service? If not, plan how to
establish foundational service definition needed to effectively map these
services.
• If your organization hasn’t clearly defined services, review these resources
for best practices on defining and mapping out your business services.
• Familiarize with the ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM) to
understand the service terminology and modelling format used by
ServiceNow.
• Visit the CSDM Community Forum to review FAQs (you can also post your
own questions in this forum as they arise during implementation).
Note: Starting with the Madrid release, Service Mapping refers to services as
“application services.” In previous releases, they’re referred to as “business
services.” This aligns with the Common Service Data Model.
Practitioner insight: Consider the method(s) you will use for mapping application services and
how you will need to prepare differently to support those methods.

Step 2: Define your vision, business objectives, and measures of
success
Gaining support from leadership and stakeholders requires a vision, business objectives, and measures of success for Service Mapping. Make sure your implementation creates value that’s
measurable and that you take the present state into account so you have an appropriate implementation plan.
Practitioner insight: If you already have an implementation project plan and you skipped Step 2,
be sure you complete it before you implement. Implementation success and adoption requires
gaining sponsorship from key stakeholders and executives—and aligning with them on
business. Make sure your project plan aligns with all outcomes from Step 2.
Define your vision, business objectives, and measures of success
• Define the vision, business objectives, and measures of success that support your
overall company objectives. Include your executive sponsor in the process to
alignment. Use our Success Checklist* to make sure your vision cascades into clear
and measurable business outcomes.
• Confirm that the vision, business goals, and measures of success are defined for the
impact that you can make with Service Mapping.
• Agree on implementation scope based on your vision. Bear in mind that achieving
your goal may be an iterative process—not accomplished within one project.
* This Success Checklist is critical and requires additional action items. Here are some
suggested business outcomes and metrics for Service Mapping to jump-start your
progress:
Suggested Service Mapping business outcomes:
 Reducing service outages
 Faster outage recovery time
 Strengthening security strategies
 Supporting a cloud-first or cloud migration strategy
Define what you need to deliver to support the business goals, such as:
 A deeper understanding of what the infrastructure does
 An understanding of how the infrastructure is connected to applications, servers,
databases, networks, etc.
 A near real-time view into the composition of services
Suggested Service Mapping success metrics:
 Percentage of CIs discovered
 Number of service maps created
 Mapping errors by type
 Services identified with top-down discovery

Step 3: Assess your team’s readiness
Confirm your implementation and maintenance resources
• Identify a project manager for implementation. This person should be experienced
with leading software implementation projects, and Agile. ServiceNow experience
is highly preferred.
• Ensure your executive sponsor is committed and fully engaged.
• Confirm your business-side Now Platform owner is committed and fully engaged
(typically a senior manager or VP).
• Identify the business process and service owners who will provide input for the
process design (especially service owners who own the services you plan to map).
• Identify the technical owners for the Service Mapping implementation and post go-
live support.
• Ask all technical team members who will be involved in implementation and
post go-live maintenance to complete ServiceNow Fundamentals training prior
to design.
• Prepare infrastructure, middleware, and security teams to support the Service
Mapping technical team.
• Confirm your technical team has the needed skills for implementation and maintenance,
including:
• ServiceNow systems administrators – Should be experienced in ServiceNow
implementation and should have taken Service Mapping Fundamentals and the
Service Mapping Implementation courses
• Testing resources
• Development resources – Should have JavaScripting skills, REST API understanding,
and the ability to handle various cloud provider interfaces and data parsing (REGEX,
INI, JSON, YAML)
• Introduce system administrators and developers to Now Learning and Now Creators to
encourage skills development.
There are multiple teams involved and specific skills required to implement and maintain Service Mapping. Make sure you have the right team in place or begin with a plan to engage
them. Don’t finalize your resourcing and project plans until you’ve assessed your team’s readiness.
Practitioner insight: You won’t know the estimated effort or commitment of resources until the
implementation scope and project plan are confirmed. Consult a ServiceNow certified partner or
ServiceNow Expert Services if you’re unsure of what your resource plan should be.
Practitioner insight: If you’re engaging external ServiceNow experts for implementation, make sure
your internal maintenance team is involved in the implementation design and configuration activities
so they can own system maintenance without knowledge transfer once implementation is complete.

Create an implementation governance committee
• Assign your designated ServiceNow platform owner, business process owners
(depending on what’s in scope for your Service Mapping implementation), IT service
desk lead, partner representative, project manager, and other business stakeholders
as required. Your executive sponsor should chair this committee.
• Define a meeting cadence, standard agenda, and decision process. In addition to
standard project tracking, meetings should include:
• Clearly identified and prioritized project objectives (e.g., improvements to process
performance, technical usability)
• A review of organizational change management activities (See slide 10 (next) for OCM
plan development.)
• Work with your executive sponsor and ServiceNow platform owner to develop a
responsibility assignment matrix (RACI) to establish a common, documented
understanding of decision rights for the migration project.
• Confirm that your governance team is prepared to define measures of success for
enterprise, IT, and operational objectives. These measures of success should come
from the goals and metrics discovered in Step 2.
Governance for your Service Mapping journey should include implementation governance and post-implementation governance. Implementation governance supports successful
implementation while post-implementation governance supports the long-term success of Service Mapping in your environment. Your implementation governance team should form your
post-implementation (maintenance) governance team.
Step 4: Create a structure for governance
Establish a technical governance subcommittee
• Assign technical stakeholders, including staff responsible for support, administration,
security, and integration. Your designated ServiceNow platform owner should chair this
subcommittee, supported by your project manager.
• Define a meeting cadence, standard agenda, and decision process. In addition to
standard project tracking, meetings should include:
• Identifying technical obstacles and strategies for resolution
• Reviewing requests for new services to be mapped or for new functionality – These should
require a business justification process before you implement them.
• Your technical governance subcommittee should report to your migration governance
committee or steering group. Establish the rights to make decisions rights between
your migration governance committee and technical governance subcommittee using a
RACI.
Practitioner insight: The governance structure you establish for implementation should set an
initial baseline for the governance you’ll need for post go-live maintenance, especially to manage
demand. See our resources on governance for additional details.

Step 5: Plan for OCM activities
Build an OCM plan
• Confirm that you have leadership and executive sponsor support for OCM,
including budget for an OCM program lead and/or ServiceNow expert
support. This should also include an explicit definition from leadership about
what good OCM should look like for your organization.
• Conduct an OCM readiness assessment* to measure how ready your
stakeholders are for the organizational change needed to support Service
Mapping. This should be conducted before design discussions. Based on your
readiness assessment, use our Success Checklist* to create an OCM plan and
develop an OCM impact analysis and risk assessment.
*Tailor these resources to your use of Service Mapping and your business
environment.
Plan for a pilot
Initiate a limited-scope pilot after the design phase and before the larger-scale Service Mapping
implementation. This is important for showing quick wins for effective OCM—and pilot feedback
will enhance the quality of the larger scale Virtual Agent implementation. Detailed activities for a
pilot are outlined in the OCM Success Checklist and Playbook.
Here are our recommendations for a Service Mapping pilot:
• Start discussions with two to four small teams that would highly benefit from Service
Mapping (e.g., IT operations teams), are interested in Service Mapping, and can commit to a
pilot.
• Confirm the chosen team is willing to share feedback and the value they gained from the
pilot.
• Put a structure in place to document the lessons learned from the pilot.
• Confirm the scope and dates for the pilot during the design phase. Most pilot scopes start
small, including between one and three non-business-critical services.
Consider organizational change management (OCM) activities throughout planning and implementation for successful adoption and long-term success.

Step 6: Plan for implementation design
The implementation design process involves multiple teams, collaborative decision-making, insight into your technical environment, and a thorough understanding of the services within
scope for Service Mapping implementation. Due to this, it can often take weeks or longer to collect the necessary information, coordinate the right people, and solidify decisions during the
design phase (the Prepare phase in Now Create). Enhance and expedite the design process by proactively collecting design-related information and initiating engagement with the required
stakeholders during your preparation.
If you’re engaging a ServiceNow-certified partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for creating an implementation project plan, provide the items in this section to enhance project planning
conversations. If preferred, complete this section with your services partner.
Understand your technical environment
• Diagram your existing architecture so you have a clear picture of the technical environment
you are working with during the design phase.
• Get a deeper understanding of the services you intend to map during implementation
• Consider which services should be in scope for your Service Mapping implementation (you
will make final decisions on this in the design phase).
• Make sure that you have a solid understanding of these services, including what they
do, who they serve, and how they’re managed.
• Create diagrams or conceptual models of these services to illustrate how they work.
Map the assets involved to the best of your ability. The more complete this diagram
is, the better. This will likely require collaboration with service owners. You can find
examples of conceptual models in the Common Services Data Model white paper.
Learn more about how Service Mapping is implemented so you’re
prepared to participate in design phase workshops
• Review our Discover and map your service assets checklist
(especially steps 2–5).
• Start thinking about how you may need to sequence Service
Mapping to best suit your organization. After implementing the
Service Mapping application, we recommend a “crawl, walk, run”
approach, starting with a small subset of simple services before
progressing into mapping increasingly complex/nested services.

What’s next?
Now that you’ve completed all preparedness items, your next steps are based on your status when you began this checklist.
1) You have a scoped project plan from ServiceNow Expert Services or a ServiceNow certified partner – Share the outputs from this checklist with ServiceNow Expert Services or your
certified partner (whomever created your project plan) to make sure the activities in your project plan reflect your checklist findings. You’ll use the checklist outputs again during
implementation execution, when you confirm your final design and resource planning.
OR
2) You don’t have a project plan yet but are interested in what’s required to prepare – Use the outputs from this checklist to inform your decisions when choosing a services partner (their
approach should align with the recommendations in this checklist) and to consider what you’ll need to implement and get the most value out of Service Mapping.
OR
3) You plan to self-implement – If you have internal ServiceNow experts with advanced knowledge of ITOM processes and technical properties (including CMDB, Discovery, and Service
Mapping), then use the checklist outputs to expedite implementation kickoff and to enhance the design phase. If you don’t have this internal expertise, contact a ServiceNow
certified partner or ServiceNow Expert Services to initiate project planning.
Note: Our experience shows that most organizations do not have sufficient expertise to self-implement and should instead work with ServiceNow Expert Services or a ServiceNow
certified partner to continue.
Related resources
• Explore Service Mapping (check the “Resources” section on this page for data sheets, case studies, e-books, and white papers)
• Webinar – Making your IT operations service-aware with ServiceNow ITOM and ITSM
• Webinar – Enable business-aware IT operations with Service Mapping
• Now Learning – Service Mapping Fundamentals (Now Learning login required)

14
Appendix

• Understand the business
objectives
• Establish program
governance
• Establish the project team
• Formally kick off the project
Initiate
• Conduct process, platform,
and integration workshops
• Define, review, and prioritize
the product backlog
• Plan the release
• Finalize the project timeline
• Document the test strategy
• Set up the environment
Plan
• Run agile scrum cycles
• Define support processes
and Hypercare approach
• Execute communications and
awareness roadshows
• Plan for UAT and system
testing
Execute
• Perform system testing and
UAT
• Plan for go-live
• Determine operational
readiness
• Hold training
• Go live
Deliver
• Operational handover
• Hypercare support
• Lessons learned
• Measure value and
champion success
• Formally close the project
Close
Appendix: Now Create – Phase summary

Customer Success Best Practices
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maximize the value of your ServiceNow investment.
Get started today. Visit Customer Success Center. Contact your ServiceNow team
for personalized assistance.
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Distilled through a
rigorous process to enhance
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Based on thousands of successful
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across the globe
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Proven to help you transform
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