Problem
A government organisation responsible for national security and public administration was in the final stages of rolling out ServiceNow for internal support requests. The platform was central to how services reached several hundred employees in operational, security and IT roles, and the rollout was one of the largest transformations the organisation had taken on.
I was brought in with a narrow task: polish the wording in the system's automated notifications. The solution was nearly finished.
Reading through it, I noticed that request types I knew were common weren't handled anywhere. The platform had been built for part of the organisation, and the parts left out ran essential functions.
Approach
I started asking around. Informal conversations turned into a structured insight process: interviews with staff from the departments left out of the original scope, and mapping of their workflows, tools and ways of communicating. Most were still running on ad hoc systems, email, spreadsheets and verbal handovers. Nobody had asked them.
I proposed extending the insight phase. That is an uncomfortable thing to propose on a project that is nearly done with a tight timeline. The team took the findings seriously and we pivoted.
We extended the solution to cover the excluded departments and built new workflows for them. I ran user testing with those groups and refined both the interface and the messaging logic.
Outcome
The platform shipped covering the whole organisation instead of part of it. The departments that had been left out got workflows built around how they actually work, and the automated messages made sense to the people receiving them.
I was hired to fix the wording. The wording was the symptom. It usually is.