Challenges with Offshore ServiceNow Teams

In enterprises that are large enough to justify a ServiceNow investment, it's also very common to employ offshore teams for development to cut costs.

• Churn of resources / retention time

  • Resources start to develop skills and get more experienced. They get hired up by a competing delivery center and disappears from your team. You have to start from scratch with a fresh candidate.

• Old truth and techniques carries forward

  • Development for something custom starts, when it should be based on new out-of-the-box functionality.

  • Your ServiceNow environment ultimately pays the price and will starts to accumulate technical debt and clean-up projects. 

• Documentation is not where it's supposed to be.

• Development is not following company standards and your ServiceNow team becomes the "odd ones" in your org. Your organization's trust in ServiceNow can suffer from this.

• Realistic timelines and estimates on the ServiceNow development stories.

  • You get a yes when you should be getting a no.

  • You are told it can come next week, when you should be told that it requires this other thing to be cancelled.

• IT equipment utilized by offshore team is not up to standards for efficient work and collaboration. 

• Mentorship for junior team members is not available in the Offshore Delivery Center.

• Can be challenging to know which ones to keep and which ones to let go, if you don't have enough time to work together with the team on a consistent basis.

  • Offshore Delivery Center might hold on to a resource for too long, when it's better for you and them to part ways and let them try something else.

  • ODC might not recruit the ideal candidates for your organizations current needs and ambitions.

• ServiceNow resources have sometimes only been exposed to ServiceNow topics, and their understanding of the real IT world out there is limited.

  • Your team's ability to work on IT Operation and Automation projects can suffer from this.