Practice · 01

ITSM, and the ghost of the old ticketing tool.

The most consistent thing I see is teams who moved to ServiceNow and rebuilt their old tool inside it. Same field names, same workflows, same friction — just behind a newer login screen. The platform supports it, the team learned it, the dashboards look fine. But the value the migration was supposed to unlock never quite arrived.

What I notice

Incidents that read like emails with statuses on them. Change management that's really an approval ritual on Fridays. SLAs that get reported but nobody trusts the numbers. Implementation partners who left a year ago and a system the team quietly avoids.

Underneath all of it, usually the same pattern: process design that assumed the platform would bend to fit the legacy way of working, instead of the team adjusting to how ITIL was actually meant to flow. The fixes are rarely technical — they're about un-customising what shouldn't have been customised in the first place.

What I've learned

OOTB-first isn't a slogan, it's a budget decision. Every customisation has a recurring cost that doesn't show up in the implementation invoice — it shows up at the next upgrade, in onboarding, in the workaround for the workaround. The senior architect's job is making that cost visible before the customisation gets approved.

Process maturity follows tool maturity, never the other way around. A perfectly-designed Change process in a wrong-shaped tool will lose to a slightly-imperfect Change process in the right shape. Get the shape right first.