A greenfield ServiceNow implementation unifying IT operations and customer service management across a 1,200-person financial services firm — delivered in 16 weeks.
The client, a mid-sized asset management firm regulated across three jurisdictions, had grown through acquisition into an IT support patchwork: one legacy ITSM tool, one homegrown ticketing system built in SharePoint, and a customer service team running entirely out of shared email inboxes. Each system had its own SLA definitions, escalation paths, and reporting formats.
The result was predictable: incidents fell through the cracks between systems, customers raised the same issue multiple times across different channels without knowing their first ticket existed, and management had no reliable data on resolution times or team workload. Audits were painful. Regulator requests for incident evidence required manual data assembly across three systems.
The brief was to implement ServiceNow ITSM and CSM simultaneously — greenfield — and consolidate all support operations onto a single platform without a service disruption during a period of elevated regulatory scrutiny.
Before touching configuration, we ran a two-week process mapping exercise with both the IT and customer service teams. The goal was to understand how work actually flowed — not how the existing systems suggested it should flow. We documented 23 distinct incident types, 8 service request categories, and 5 customer escalation paths.
This informed a ServiceNow data model built around real workflows rather than out-of-box defaults. Assignment groups, categories, and SLA definitions were all grounded in the actual operating model — making adoption significantly easier downstream.
Incident, Problem, Change, and Request Management were configured in parallel with a phased testing approach. The Change Management workflow was particularly complex, requiring integration with the firm's existing CAB process and alignment with FCA change notification requirements. We built a custom change classification engine that automatically flags regulatory-relevant changes for expedited review.
A self-service portal was configured with a searchable knowledge base, 34 pre-built service request templates, and live queue visibility for requesters — reducing "where's my ticket?" enquiries by 61% in the first month.
The CSM module was configured with case management, customer-facing portal, and email-to-case ingestion from the three legacy inboxes. All historical email threads going back 18 months were parsed and imported as cases — giving agents full context from day one.
Integration with the firm's CRM (Salesforce) brought account and client data into ServiceNow, enabling agents to see the client's tier, open opportunities, and recent interactions before responding to a case. This eliminated the most common agent frustration: being blind to who they were actually talking to.
Cutover was executed over a single weekend to minimise disruption. All three legacy systems were decommissioned simultaneously rather than running in parallel — a deliberate choice to prevent agents from defaulting to old habits. A dedicated hypercare team provided on-site support for the first five business days, with response times averaging under four minutes during that period.
Within 60 days of go-live, the client had decommissioned all three legacy systems, reduced average incident resolution time from 4.2 days to 1.1 days, and produced its first fully automated monthly SLA report — a process that had previously taken two analysts three days to compile manually.
The most dangerous outcome in a project like this is replicating the old mess on a new platform. Three systems with three different processes, moved to ServiceNow with three parallel workflows, would have cost more to run than the legacy environment. The process mapping investment in weeks 1–4 was what made everything else possible.
The regulatory benefit materialised almost immediately. Within 30 days of go-live, the client received an FCA information request and was able to produce a complete, timestamped incident history in under two hours — work that would previously have taken a week.
"We went from dreading audit requests to being able to answer them in the same day. That alone justified the entire project."
— Head of IT Operations, Financial Services Client