Good Practices for Asset Management, Part I

[JonSNash]

Asset Management is becoming a very popular topic for many of you.   In this Blog post I want to share some "good practices" for your asset management implementation. I'm not calling these "best practices" because I think the topic is way too big and some of this falls into the categories of common sense, experience and, of course, using good judgement. Let's start with the data, because this will form the foundation for anything you do in asset management.

Control the Quality of your Data (Before You Even Get It)

The first chapter of the very first "data processing" book I read in college was titled "Garbage In - Garbage Out." Nothing has changed since, and it has become my asset management mantra.

I ran into this situation during my very first asset project years ago and it became one of my most trusted best practices. During that project, my client had already received the data from internal and external groups, but it turned out to be a mismatched collection of data types and formats. This added lots of unnecessary effort to transform and clean-up the dissimilar data sets.

As I learned early on, controlling data quality definitely needs to be part of your planning. Get out in front of this and identify where you will get your data and make sure you do everything you can to get clean data up front.

Don't Eat the Whole Elephant (It's a Big One!)

Asset management has the potential to be more unwieldy than any other project you undertake in ServiceNow. It's not just the potential size of the database that impacts the project, but also everything it touches (asset management overlaps with many other organizations and process flows within the business, for example finance, warehouse, fulfillment, HR, operations and contracts to name a few).

So, to use another cliche -- don't eat the elephant whole. Break down your project into bite size phases. I know this isn't always easy given financial and organizational goals and that the size of the manageable phase and its goals will vary from organization to organization, but do what you can to plan, plan, plan and keep that inertia going from one phase to the next. Remember: Smaller, simpler releases typically mean easier to manage projects.

Prioritize Your Requirements

You won't regret breaking down your project into smaller pieces if you can. If you are able to do this, it's important to prioritize these phases and be practical about what should come first.

I recommend using the ISO/IEC 19770-1 software asset management standard to prioritize the different tiers of deployment. This standard breaks down deployments into four tiers:

Tier 1 - Trustworthy Data

Tier 2 - Practical Management

Tier 3 - Operational Integration

Tier 4 - Full Conformance*

*Strategic Conformance - See page 9 of ServiceNow's Asset Management Participant Guide

When the foundation is too flat to be useful, a project will lose its inertia. For example, if you load all of your data but don't incorporate any process or operational integrations, the data will quickly become stale.

On the other hand, you also don't want an implementation that's too tall and narrow to really do anything. An example of this extreme would be introducing processes but only for a small subset of data. In this case, the program would work, but only for a small part of the business.

Ensure Senior Stakeholder Participation

You need actual participation from senior stakeholders -- not just approval or buy-in. Because asset management projects can span multiple organizations, you'll likely need help navigating some of the waters that typically separate these organizations. That's where the participation factor comes into play. Senior stakeholder participation can go a long way in helping you gain access to resources, agree on integration strategies and much more. While senior stakeholders may not know or want to know the details, if they understand the project's objectives, they can give you the hot knife to cut through all that organizational butter.

Don't Overlook the Importance of Training

Adoption is hard enough when it's your own team. When it's everyone else's teams, you're talking a "full court press" on training. Most people want to be successful, so if they don't have the tools and the skills they need to make that happen, they will likely shy away from the solution. Your job is to make training so simple, there is no room for push-back. Remember:Process Training + Tool Training = Adoption. Be sure to consider different types of process user and tool training including lectures, hands-on training, job aids and even videos.   ServiceNow offers a formal 3 day training class.   See ServiceNow Asset Management Training for details.

In my next post I'll round out my thoughts with six more tips regarding Asset Management Good Practi....