Improving end user perceptions: GuideVision’s Knowledge 2021 live chat

GuideVision is proud to have taken part in one of the year’s most important events on the ServiceNow calendar: Knowledge 2021. Sales Manager Jan Otýpka and Head of Pre-Sales Lukáš Varaja answered participants’ questions on creating platform engagement in a live chat during Knowledge 2021, and we have collected some of the questions for you here. If you would like to speak with our ServiceNow experts, please get in touch.

Q: We do not have Organizational Change Management (OCM) established in our organization. What would you recommend to ensure successful project deliveries?

A: Our experience is that not every client has OCM established. In case there is no formal OCM, we always try to find another solution. We can partly substitute it with the right people for different organizational departments which are involved in the particular delivery. We always try to contact IT reps together with marketing. Also, main stakeholders and end user reps to define the right strategy for promoting the solution. We basically define the launch strategy.

It’s also very important to involve people from the ServiceNow governance team on the client's side. This is a very important group of people governing platform engagement on strategic, operational portfolio and technical levels.

Our opinion is that project deliveries should always include some effort to promote project outputs. Depending on the scope, type of delivery, target group, etc., you can estimate how much is needed and finally invested.

Q: What is your experience with embedded help and guided tours? How often do your clients implement them?

A: Thank you for your question. Unfortunately, these options are quite often skipped. Customers tend to save the effort for other development output instead of investing into this. To be fair, we have to admit that sometimes it's really not necessary. It really depends on the implementation scope and solution design. The easier and more intuitive the solution is, the less effort is expected in supporting features like help and tours. They simply save time for different things and details.

Customers often internally train end users instead of investing into end user help. Which we consider also as a very important end users engagement. It's always positively accepted.

Honestly, the Guided Tours feature is the most valuable for business processes instead of IT-related task-based procedures. We expect that with ‘Process Automation Designer’, organisations will start implementing more demanding cross-enterprise business processes which may require supporting helps and tours.

Q: How do you support end users' engagement apart from leveraging technology features within your deliveries? Can you imagine end users somehow participating in the development process? If so, what are the benefits?

A: Thank you! Firstly, the active participation of targeted users always promises a great pay-off. At least the same if not better compared to the appreciation of advertisement-related efforts. Our experience is that these users positively accept the solution, especially when they have a chance to co-define it. The positive reaction already starts in the testing phase - they come with suggestions, they appreciate resits, and so on.

ServiceNow has also one more ace in its sleeve, so to speak. ServiceNow has been announced by Gartner as a low-code/no-code platform in 2020. With every low-code/no-code feature, we are getting closer to end users, hence closer to delivery success. So dedicated users may participate using LC/NC features at least in the prototyping stage, or even in the delivery stage. But as they see that there is no necessity to script all the solution components, they actually like and trust the platform more and maybe they can help.

The benefits? Better acceptance and a positive spirit. It basically helps to create one coherent client and vendor team, so the work is much rewarding. As for the solution, these people are not so much tied to the technology, so they come with different suggestions and approaches.

Q: What are your typical recommendations and best practices in engaging end users within your implementation projects?

A: Thank you for your question. There are no hard criteria to select the right approach. What we do is that we always try to react to the current client's setup in terms of existing features, implementation scope, target audience, and the time we have. Based on that, we can leverage the most appropriate approach. Time specifically is a very important input because it may limit the range of engagement possibilities.