Evergreen Evolve (EE)

Customers tell us their biggest problem with ServiceNow is they can’t keep up with the demand. Because ServiceNow is a powerful, workflow platform on which beautiful end-to-end customer services can be built quickly, IT’s customers come asking for help.

This is compounded by the shortage of people with ServiceNow skills. Most try to solve their ServiceNow demand problem with a combination of internal staff, outside consultants and offshore support/skills, but this approach has its challenges.

Internal Teams

Internal Teams are viewed as most cost-effective and most flexible, but they come at a high price. Recruiting, hiring, managing, training, disciplining, firing and replacing turnover are a lot of work. And while flexible, internal teams respond slowly to demand change – not scaling up or down very quickly. Even if you build a good team – where can they turn for help? They have no expert backup.

Outside Consultants

Outside Consultants bring senior skills, varied experience and proven methodologies. They can replace poor performers and scale quickly. But they are very expensive and you have to teach them your business. Given high cost, they can’t stay for long, so you are always in the education cycle. 

Offshore Support Providers

Offshore Support Providers have low rates and can scale quickly. But often skills, experience and leadership are weak, turnover is high and communication, culture and time zone differences compound the weaknesses. 

Modern platforms like ServiceNow require an Agile implementation methodology to be successful. Unfortunately, many IT Operations organizations do not have an effective Agile methodology in place or practical experience with Agile.

We created Evergreen Evolve (EE) specifically to fix this problem – a modern, unique approach to ServiceNow services with senior expertise that’s fast, flexible and very affordable.

EE provides you a dedicated part to full time team of senior only, implementation certified ServiceNow consultants, delivered by our global workforce. You also get dedicated; US thought leadership in your assigned engagement manager and senior solutions architect, who work closely with our offshore team of senior developers.

These skilled resources are backed by all of Evergreen through our collaborative workspace model, as well as the strength and resources of a ServiceNow Gold Level Partner. Your dedicated Evolve team works with your internal team to become one team, creating a single service solution. Evolve is one single, flexible contract that can handle the full range of ServiceNow demand – from daily operational support up to your most critical, strategic projects. One team, one contract, one solution.

EE is available two ways – EE Staff Augmentation and EE Complete. 

EE Staff Augmentation is designed for customers with strong program, project and ITIL transformation process skills in house, but still need additional technical resources. EE Staff Augmentation provides both senior on or offshore developers and senior onshore solutions architects – part to full time, to meet your needs.

EE Complete brings the technical skills of EE Staff Augmentation, and adds a part to full time Engagement Manager – a seasoned ITSM / ITIL transformation consultant and program/project manager who manages the EE team and provides senior process and program leadership.

Given the unique nature of services in support of the ServiceNow platform, Evergreen created EE+1, a number of additional features included as part of EE Complete:

• “Ideation” a better approach to get new ideas from customers
• Simple demand management – a simple way to rank demand on value, risk and cost
• Ongoing portfolio ranking – for review and planned scheduling of high priority projects
• A three phase, ServiceNow strategy & roadmap so your ServiceNow efforts are aligned with your business needs
• Evergreen’s Implementation Methodology (EIM), a proven Agile methodology which can be installed in your ServiceNow environment
• Our complete Service Design Process, which can be installed in your ServiceNow environment

By balancing our on and offshore workforces, EE average hourly rates for senior only, certified consultants range from $68 to $120 per hour, generally equal to or less than what you are spending today. Last, EE has no long-term lock in. You can cancel your EE contract at any time, with 30 days' notice.

• Only Senior, certified experts
• Dedicated team — knows your business
• Low rates
• Flexible
• Scales quickly
• Expert backup
• Access to all Evergreen methodology and body of consulting knowledge, pre-built materials, processes, even code
• Complete solution
• Evolve +1 additional features at no additional cost (with EE Complete)

EE Senior, ServiceNow Certified Consultants

Evergreen Evolve technical team members are all senior, ServiceNow implementation certified consultants, with deep industry experience. EE Engagement Managers are all senior, ITSM / ITIL process consultants as well as Service Management program transformation leaders.

Senior skills matter. A study done by Harvard Business Review and Bain Consulting in 2017 found that a senior developer is 9 times more effective than an average one. According to Apple Computer – “the best developer at Apple writes nine times more usable code per day than the average software engineer.”

Senior skills are a massive force multiplier. Not only do they do things right – they do the right things. Average performers waste an incredible amount of time by doing the wrong things, which then need to be redone, or worse – those wrong things are put into production and are POOR solutions – potentially driving down effectiveness across the entire organization.

Evergreen Evolve has only senior people, and they do cost more – per person. But we CONSERVATIVELY estimate that our senior people are at least two to three times as effective as average performers – which then makes us highly cost effective. The old saying – “you get what you pay for” when it comes to developers, may be 9 times truer than we realize.

EE Collaboration

Your Evolve team has access to all our tools and processes, and they are backed by our entire team of consultants and architects, in our Slack collaborative workspace.

We have a workspace for every client where all the communication occurs and artifacts are stored. We also have workspaces by topic area – like ITSM, Configuration, Asset, and Service Catalog, where every EE consultant can ask questions & get help from the rest of the company at any time – and even though all our team members are senior, this still happens dozens of times every day. With unified search across all channels – every consultant can search for relevant solutions, artifacts or even code already built – saving you time & money.

 
EE Frees You to Do Your Real Job

Which might your CIO prefer you do? Build and manage a ServiceNow team, or have a capable, senior team today, so you can support and drive corporate strategy and employee enablement with the ServiceNow platform?

While that may sound a bit silly, the truth is – the more time you spend doing the first, the less time you have for the second. We are so used to the old approach of developing and managing a team, we may not stop to think how much work it really is. Here’s a list of a lot of things you no longer have to do, with EE.

If you could eliminate these issues tomorrow, with no risk, what could you truly achieve?

Evergreen Evolve +1 Additional Functionality

EE Complete comes with valuable, additional functionality to enable you to support and extend the ServiceNow platform across your enterprise - for IT and beyond. You can use as much or as little of it as you like, it’s up to you.

3 Phase ServiceNow Strategy & Roadmap

Early on in EE Complete, the Engagement Manager leads you in developing a three phase, strategic ServiceNow roadmap, aligned with your business value as well as efforts to drive more customer centric service management. This allows us as a single, unified team to invest our energy where it makes the most sense.

Not only do we get a strategy that all understand, we have a plan with clear & measurable goals, communicated across all constituents with a common language and a basis for making good tradeoff decisions. 

ServiceNow Demand Management

Along with having more demand than you can meet, the demand can come from a wide variety of requestors, both inside and outside of IT. This happens as ServiceNow begins to be accepted as a service or workflow automation platform across the enterprise. You are actually running an application development function (for ServiceNow) in IT Operations. To do so, you need to manage demand.

Evolve Complete brings tools to help you manage your ServiceNow demand. From self-service interaction with your customers to maturing and ranking ideas, to aligning resources and funding, to feeding approved projects into an Agile engagement methodology built in your ServiceNow SDLC - Evolve Complete helps you run an effective ServiceNow development capability in IT Operations. This follows a three-step process.

Ideation is the first step – the self-service capture of new ideas and enhancements directly from our customers. We make it easy and simple to self-service right at the point where they are in the service experience. 

The second step is scoring and ranking. We help you organize and sort the variety of ideas and requests flowing in, with a consistent, rational ranking approach based on business value, risk, and cost. This addresses two of the biggest challenges in managing demand – everyone tends to think their idea is the most important, and everyone thinks their ideas are great when in many cases neither is true. Scoring and ranking give you a simple, non-emotional quantification of possible demand, which helps your customers to better understand, in a rational way.

The third step is creating a better reality for your next 6 - 12 month window of potential projects. To do this, we take our list of possible projects that we rate most highly for the next 6-12 months and might want to do. Then we take their calculated cost/level of effort a step further and estimate the level of effort each might require by 3 specific roles – the engagement/project manager, the solution architect and the developer. Finally, we sum the hours by role for the 12 month period and define our sourcing & funding strategy – considering internal, consulting and possible offshore resources to help meet the demand.

This gives us a high level, but clear view of valuable activities over the next 12 months, and helps us prevent falling into the trap of having too many projects we cannot resource.

Evergreen’s Proven Agile Implementation Methodology running in your ServiceNow SDLC instance

We are now at the point where we are going to launch an approved project. EE Complete helps here too. At Evergreen we have developed an Agile approach that we use in all our consulting, which we call the Evergreen Implementation Methodology, or EIM. It combines people, process, technology and governance in a unified motion, and we can build it right into your ServiceNow SDLC. It can become a reliable backbone for effectively supporting your ServiceNow platform - from simple enhancements all the way up to large, strategic projects.

Best of all – our teams work together - becoming one team, working against the portfolio of projects – not just one or two. This gives us the power of flexibility. For example, say the team is working on a particular project and a high priority need comes up on short notice. With EE Complete, we can easily pause the current project, move the team to the higher priority and then pick up right where they left off on the current project once the high priority need is complete.

Evergreen Service Design Process

Along with our Agile implementation methodology and process, it is important to put in place a consistent service design process. While we might want to have many parts of IT and beyond IT involved in creating services on ServiceNow, we will be much more successful if we follow a common, well-articulated service design process.

EE Complete beings you a complete Service Design Process for your use, which can be installed in your ServiceNow instance. It considers how the service will look to the customer, what its functionality will be, how the work will flow from start to finish, how we engineer in customer feedback, and what KPIs and metrics are needed to ensure the service delivers as we need it to.

EE Customer Quotes 

"We are at a crossroads today and thanks to your [Evergreen Evolve] efforts we are a shining example to the rest of the business. There are other IT units that have had failures - major upgrade failures - and these become visible to senior management. We are one of the few that have not become visible due to failure, we are visible simply because of quality work, dedication and making it happen." - Director of ITSM, Fortune 500 Diversified Services Firm