Welcome to ServiceNow®
HR Service Delivery
Are you ready to start your HR Service Delivery (HRSD) implementation journey? With ServiceNow HRSD, you’ll boost employee productivity and engagement, provide efficient, personalized HR services, and help your employees stay connected with HR anytime and anywhere. This guide gives you the information you need to get going fast, including proven guidance and links to valuable resources—all designed to set you on the path to success. While this guide is primarily designed for ServiceNow platform owners, it also contains useful information if you have a different role in your organization.
Familiarize Yourself
With HRSD
Case & Knowledge Management
HRSD comes with more than a dozen applications that let you transform how you deliver HR services. But don’t worry! You don’t have to implement everything at once. Learn how to focus your implementation.
Standardize the documentation and fulfillment of employee inquiries and requests to deliver a better service experience. (product page)
Provide a multi-departmental employee portal so people can stay engaged, productive, and informed—and easily request the services they need. (product page) (product documentation)
Employee Center
Here are the applications of HRSD
- Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions
- Employee Journey Management
- Alumni Service Center
- Employee Document Management (requires separate license)
HRSD Professional
HRSD Enterprise
- Case and Knowledge Management
- Now Mobile
- Agent Workspace
- Mobile Agent
- Employee Center
- Universal Request
- Employee Relations
- Performance Analytics
- Virtual Agent
- Predictive Intelligence
- Document Templates
- Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions
- Employee Journey Management
- Alumni Service Center
- Employee Document Management (requires separate license)
HRSD is a scoped application. There are two types of available application scopes: private application scope (commonly referred to as scoped apps) and global scope. Each ServiceNow application has an application scope that determines which of its resources are available to other parts of the system. Application scoping ensures that one application does not impact another application. You can specify what parts of the application other applications can access by setting application access settings. More details of a scoped application can be found here within the ‘Understanding Application Scope on the Now Platform’ community article.
HRSD and Employee Experience
When you combine these two major applications with the foundational pieces such as profiles from HCM integration, COE tables and HR Services, HR Agent Workspace, HR Security, Dashboards and Reporting, and others then you create the foundation upon which you can build an ever improving, robust HR professional experiences that enables engaging and productive employee experiences.Your HRSD service delivery solution should be designed to provide services to employees in the most effective manner possible.
Here are the key HRSD application to focus on first:
This Human Resources Fundamentals on-demand course will also help you to understand some of the key HRSD applications and how they work. If you are new to ServiceNow, we also recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn the platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available.Our Now Create HRSD Recommended Implementation Sequence leads you through the applications from building the “Foundation” all the way to making your company “Fly”. It suggests an order for release and the groupings of applications designed to lead to customer success.
Identify your Desired Business Outcomes
Before you start to implement HRSD, it’s critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. HRSD allows you to deliver many positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals.
If you want guidance on maximizing the value of your HRSD investment, ServiceNow success maps shows you how to envision, create, validate, and champion value using Now Value, our proven methodology to realize success with ServiceNow. This success map covers employee service delivery, while this success map addresses employee lifecycle events.
Pro Tip
Identify Business Outcomes
Choose your Implementation
Path
To accelerate time to value and reduce risk, make sure that your partner uses Now Create, ServiceNow’s library of more than 700 leading implementation practices. We also recommend you use Now Create if you are self-implementing, as it provides a wealth of assets designed to guide you to success.
If you want to work with a partner but haven’t selected one yet, check out our Partner Finder or talk to your ServiceNow account representative about ServiceNow Expert Services. We can also work with your chosen partner to infuse our expertise into your implementation through our ServiceNow Assure service offering.
Work with ServiceNow Experts
Asset Library
Service Partners
If you plan to self-implement, you will need to build your platform team’s knowledge and skills before you begin. This is another reason why many HRSD customers choose to work with a partner instead of self-implementing. The following certification paths are a good starting point for building these skills, but we strongly recommend that you also engage resources who have previous HRSD implementation experience and are certified in HRSD implementations.
- Human Resources (HR) Implementation certification
- ServiceNow Fundamentals certification
- Application Developer certification
Note: Search Now Learning for related courses.
Attend [or watch] ‘Live on ServiceNow’ webinars and customer meetups
Several times each month we deliver webinars or customer meetups for HRSD, Unified Employee Experience (Employee Center Pro/Employee Center and Content), and related topics. Webinars are usually an hour in length with a product overview, live demonstration, with questions and answers throughout the session. Customers meetups are also typically an hour with a brief topic overview and prompt questions that lead to an open question and answer segment where anyone can ask any question about that topic.
Discover upcoming HRSD-related Live on ServiceNow events. Watch the previously recorded on-demand webinars.
If you have chosen to work with a ServiceNow partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for your implementation, it's important to clearly communicate the business outcomes you want to achieve and agree on a well structured roadmap to attain these goals. If you need guidance on successfully engaging with an implementation partner, this workbook is an excellent starting point.
For a comprehensive implementation process framework that is proven to scale to the largest, most complex global deployments,search for Success Packs on Now Create. Success Packs tailor our core Now Create methodology of more than 700 leading practices to deliver business outcomes aligned with specific product sets. There are many Success Packs for HRSD, including the following:
- HR Service Delivery with Employee Center supports the digital fulfillment of employee inquiries and requests and the standardization of documentation and interactions using HR Service Delivery Case and Knowledge Management.
- Employee Lifecycle with Employee Center supports the onboarding, offboarding, and transitions that occur during an employee's lifecycle.
This implementation checklist [download] can also help you get ready for implementation, and the following playbooks provide specific guidance on HR knowledge management and enterprise onboarding.
Join the HRSD Community
Visit the HRSD community page. You’ll find best practices and other useful resources for HRSD implementation, and it’s also the forum to talk to ServiceNow experts, get your questions answered, and connect with other community members.
If you’re not already on the latest ServiceNow release, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before you go live. By upgrading, you get new ServiceNow innovations into the hands of your users faster, gain access to the latest performance and security enhancements, and ensure that support is there when you need it. To make your upgrade smooth and successful, check out these upgrade resources.
Understand ServiceNow releases & Upgrades
Stick to out-of-the-box ServiceNow functionality wherever possible when self-implementing. The process guides below provide detailed descriptions of “as designed” ServiceNow functionality for key HRSD capabilities.
Expert tip:
ServiceNow Expert
Implementation
For those of you who have purchased ServiceNow Impact services you will have ServiceNow experts and resources at your fingertips to help you through your implementation of ITSM and achieving your goals. If you do not have a ServiceNow Impact package, consider how having dedicated resources, discounted training, and jumpstart services can help you get the most out of your ServiceNow investment. Read more here.
Guide for Self Implementation
Make your implementation smooth & easy
Build your team's skills
Define roles Roles
control access to features and capabilities in applications and modules. The (application) admin role provides access to all features and capabilities.
After access has been granted to a role, all the groups or users assigned to the role are granted access. Roles can contain other roles, and any access granted to a role is granted to any role that contains it.
For a complete list of the roles included with the ServiceNow platform, see Base system roles.
In addition to these core capabilities themselves, it is important to also consider how they will be administrated, managed, and governed. ServiceNow requires the System Admin (sys-admin) role as part of the platform. When installing the HR Scoped App, which includes HR Agent Workspace for case management, you will also need individuals assigned to the HR Admin role (sn_hr_core.admin). Roles also determine who can create and publish knowledge and who can read them. You might also need special secure roles for Employee Relations due to the sensitive nature of those cases. For more information about setting up HR roles, see Manage HR Roles.
Deploy HRSD
Prepare your organization for change and have resources at your fingertips.
To successfully deploy HRSD, you need your business to understand and use HRSD, and to recognize its benefits. To do this, you need to communicate what is changing and why—both to your end users and to your service desk agents. You also need to ensure that your operational HR staff are trained on ServiceNow HRSD.
This webpage provides detailed guidance on how to plan for organizational change. If you need help creating a winning communications plan, this communications plan template also provides useful advice.
The following courses are a great starting point for training your HRSD process users:
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