When you are embarking on a new implementation of ServiceNow or deploying a new application, reports and analytics must be a key requirement in your initial phase.

Too often, I hear organizations limiting initial implementations to only basic reports, or scope analytics for a future phase.

Instead, proactive organizations get more value out of implementations by crafting advanced reports early in the process and iterating alongside the process improvements. Building advanced analytics early improves user workflow, develops more reliable data, and helps executives see value early.

Smart Dashboards Driving Efficient Work on Day One

The goal of implementing a new ServiceNow instance or application is to create a more efficient workflow for your users. Smart real-time dashboards are a powerful tool in the tool kit, focusing your users on the most urgent tasks and synthesizing information in ways that enable quick response.

In this example, the work dashboard goes beyond simple pie and bar charts to give users the information they need in order to act:

Scorecards focus the user’s attention on critical information, like the stale incidents, aged incidents, and breached SLAs that the user is responsible for.

Critically, rather than simply showing a flat list of tasks, each of the reports focuses on the age of assigned tasks, allowing the user to prioritize those assignments that are closest to breaching SLAs or becoming overdue.

One organization used Explore Analytics to reduce stale incidents by 30%, simply by providing users’ dashboards with advanced analytics focused on stale incidents.

Rather than going live with a solution that leaves your users in the dark, deploy your instance or application tailored to the way you want your users to work on day one.

More Reliable Data through Data Analysis

Often, I hear administrators saying that advanced analytics is scoped for future phases of deployment because the data in the instance or application isn’t ready yet.

This overlooks the important role that advanced analytics plays in ensuring that the data being collected is reliable.

For instance, this CMDB Quality Dashboard allows business service owners to take an active role in ensuring that the CMDB data is reliable and up-to-date for their services:

Each tab focuses the user on potential data issues that need to be addressed. They can drill through and take action to correct data quality issues.

Rather than waiting for data issues to resolve themselves, advanced analytics drive the data improvement. Users throughout the organization become involved in ensuring reliable and up-to-date data that can power analytics in other use cases.

Executive Visibility from the Very Beginning

By capturing trends of data from the beginning, executives can see the impact of the implementation over time. By setting key KPI’s early, executives can see how the new instance or application is being used by users.

This report, for example, combines information from two different data sources, both ServiceNow and the legacy ticketing tool used prior to ServiceNow:

The line in orange shows the flow of incidents before ServiceNow was enabled, and projects based on the old trend. The line in blue shows the flow of incidents after ServiceNow was enabled, and the projects the reduction of incidents into the future.

For each key KPI, executives can be assured that their priorities are being tracked and managed to through visibility on day one.

Achieve Value Early with Analytics on Day One

As you can see, there is important value left on the table if analytics aren’t included in your new instance or application. With powerful analytics, you can shape how users are working, improve the quality if your data, and ensure executives can transparently track your successes.

With an easy-to-use reporting tool, you can get started immediately. Get started early and iterate your reports to ensure that you start on the right foot from the beginning.

In the last few years, the pace of staff turnovers has accelerated more than ever. Each onboarding process is a significant investment of time and resources, and successful onboardings are critical to having an efficient and effective support organization.

There are two ways to improve onboarding through onboarding insights. The first approach is to identify patterns of successful onboardings, to replicate what is working well – for example, effective trainers or useful onboarding guides. The second approach is to identify bottlenecks in the onboarding process to guide continual process improvements, focusing on the biggest delays that block new members of the organization from reaching peak productivity.

Learn from Onboarding Successes

The first step in understanding how the hiring process impacts your organization’s efficiency is to measure how quickly new members of the organization can get fully productive.

One measure is to examine how quickly members of the organization can take on a full workload. Whether your support organization works tickets, incidents, tasks, or cases, you can measure a member of the organization’s productivity by how many they are resolving.

The following report uses a calculation to see how quickly members can handle full loads of tasks and compares the outcome between different trainers. In this case, it uses IT Incidents, but the same report can be created for HR Cases, Facilities Incidents, or any other task your organization handles on a regular basis.

The report counts how many incidents assignees resolve within the first 12 weeks of their work. In order to measure the data, it requires a calculation: [Incident.Resolved] – [Incident.Assigned_To.Created]. The time duration between when the assignee resolved an incident and the assignee hire date.

By binning the results into three categories (less than one month, one to two months, and two to three months), we can see how many incidents are resolved by each member of the organization within their first three months.

By further grouping the data by trainer, we can identify which trainers’ methods are effectively enabling new team members to resolve more incidents quickly:

End Onboarding Bottlenecks

Another major pain point during the onboarding process is the time required to equip a new hire. After all, your organization’s members can’t be productive if they don’t have the proper tools at hand.

To reduce the delivery time, you need to identify and resolve process bottlenecks. Frequently, process issues leave new members of the organization waiting for their important devices to arrive. One of the most common issues is items being stuck in the approval process.

The next report shows how calculations can identify bottlenecks, by breaking up the end-to-end delivery time into stages. The calculation measures durations between different date-time fields that mark stages within the delivery process. Here, we also use a calculation to show what percent of the delivery time was spent waiting for approvals.

By identifying which stages in the process take up the most time, you can focus your attention on the process bottlenecks that, when resolved, will have the biggest impact on efficiently onboarding your team. In this example, we’re focused on approvals, but you can just as easily target other common steps in the fulfillment process (e.g. pulling from inventory, installation, etc.)

Focus on High-Impact Improvements to Onboarding

As we’ve seen, analytics provide the ability to focus your attention on improvements to the onboarding process that will yield high impact on your onboarding process.

By identifying onboarding successes and bottlenecks, you can build upon what’s working and improve what isn’t.

These are valuable lessons that can greatly improve the efficiency of your organization by ensuring that new members are quickly and easily brought to full productivity.