welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow hey everyone welcome to another episode of titans of servicenow in this episode we're celebrating glide fast consulting's fourth inductee to the titans pantheon she has been featured in many glide fast webinars which you can check out in the links below she's one of the highest rated speakers at knowledge19 for her showcase of glidefast's epic public website built on the service portal she is a web designer extraordinaire and queen of the service portal ladies and gentlemen taisse pulliam bonjour wow what a pleasure thanks for having me the pleasure is mine you were highly recommended by glidefast so i had to get you on i got some really big shoes if you win the seat i do we always start at the start why don't you tell us how you got your starting servicenow ecosystem i started with servicenow in 2016 i came from a front-end web development background and i got an opportunity with a consulting firm at that time and i took it from there everything kind of happened really fast i had about a month of exposure to servicenow before i got thrown into my first project there was definitely a lot of figuring it out thinking fast and learning learning servicenow and also i.t as well as the iq framework which were all very new to me coming from a web dev background it was definitely a different concept i was no longer making websites for an end user or a consumer per se i was now implementing solutions for entire organizations and also having to leverage brand new processes to me that were surely exciting but new to me at the time and i liked it i enjoyed the hustle i liked the possibilities and potential of the platform i fell in love with consulting what did you love most about it i loved getting to work with so many different companies and getting to share my knowledge from what i learned in the tool and with that you know not only building solutions but also having the ability to work with those organizations and teaching them how to fish for themselves one more thing that really got me hooked was the exposure to so many different projects i think that enabled me to learn so much at that point from those organizations and learn how they operate and how the departments operate and the peculiarities that each one of them carries in comparison to other ones because one thing that you see with consulting is that every single corporation is very unique and no projects are alike and i love the learning opportunities that i gained from that ain't that the truth yeah i think it's been the blessing over my twelve years is just the variety of stuff that you get to that you should know when you learn yeah and it's so sometimes you'll never you'll never come across that experience again right but it's still like a pearl that you can and the learning that you take for the future and you know sometimes you can apply in different projects so did you start off with service portal development or did you go broad on the platform i started off with servicenow in general but i definitely have the front-end web development background and my first implementation was actually um upgrade from fuji to geneva and even also migration from express to servicenow enterprise so service portal was not really a thing back then we had the ess legacy now portal but since day one you know because of my design skills that in my eye for design i definitely got thrown straight away into getting the design going for the ess and working with jelly which thank god it's not something we do anymore what happened is i definitely started getting more and more pulled into that user experience area and service portal but i definitely had my share of experiences with it in general itsm because when i started that was definitely you know the hot thing service now we did not have csm or anything like that before i get a lot of questions about how do i learn servicenow faster or what skill set should i have in advance could you give any insight as to well how long it took you as a front-end developer to kind of get service portal and understand service portal to the extent that you can actually consult on it at a high level i think that a good advice would be try to bring as much as your past background and experience into what you're doing now i did not understand at the beginning a lot of the concepts around iet processes and some of those new things for me but i definitely had my knowledge of javascript and angularjs and all of those things that ended up being very useful in the servicenow space so you definitely have an upper hand in that sense where you can use those skills into the development in service now and if you are already a coder and a developer it's like after you learn your first language it it's easier to learn the second one and i think that's how i was able to get things going and learning things really fast in the servicenow space so a second ago we were talking about like the variety of projects and things you can look back on and say wow so i'm looking for one of those oh wow moments for you what was one of those projects that just got you like it got you right in the feels and you can't get it out of your head even years later there are so many cool projects that i had the pleasure to be a part of so it's almost unfair to come up with only one i think there was definitely nothing like being a part and having the privilege to architect the first website which is the first public portal to be built on servicenow in the united states it's actually the topic that we covered in a session acknowledge 19 that i presented with my esteemed colleague travis thousand this presentation ended up being one of the highest attended and highest rated sessions of the entire conference and we got a lot of attention because we presented on a very hot and new topic which was this portal and developing this portal brought an immense amount of challenges because it is the first portal of its kind and we were really pushing the limits of the platform with it but all in all the project was delivered successfully and gained tremendous amount of visibility within the community and even many customers have reached out to try to replicate some of what we have accomplished with this portal so i definitely have this as one of my highlighted projects that i like to look back at now tell me about a project where you're like i'm not gonna make it like deep in the trenches really difficult i get a lot of positive feedback from my community when they know that people they look up to in the space had really difficult trials and tribulations as well definitely for me the biggest moment was in the start when i was new to servicenow there was a lot to take in and learn really fast i got thrown into some very high visibility projects and especially considering i was very young and i started with servicenow when i was turning 22. so i was definitely the youngest one sitting at any table at any meeting so often times i'll question myself and question what value did i bring to this table and now i see that there is a reason why you are at the table in the first place so you have to count on the tools that you have collected with your experience up to this moment in your life and to me that was leveraging all of my front-end and ux background and translating that into skills that would help me come with solutions in service now and then even now finding a whole new niche in this case scenarios that i translated into something that i could really use to stand out so i know glidefast must have its own kind of methodologies and whatnot but is there any kind of thing that you do in particular on your projects that makes you stand out i don't like to lift and shift what i have done in the past for one client to another when i first start working with a customer i really like to act like a sponge so i absorb the culture of the organization and i take the time to understand their goals and objectives from their lenses and how they do things and how i can improve some of those processes without removing their identity which is something that not always gets done on those projects i know that there are a lot of best practices that need to be considered and taking into account but at the same time for me it's very important to keep in mind how the organization does things and how we can make that work for them so that we make sure that user adoption is also going to be all-time high yeah mike limbardo calls you the ux queen but i think the term is still relatively new for people who maybe aren't even front-end developers could you tell the community what is like what why would you be the ux queen and what is ux anyway absolutely i think that i am very known as the portal resource and even porto guru in some way in in my space i work definitely with the majority of my projects in some kind of role related portal but i like this question because to me i would even say that my expertise definitely lays on ux and ux comes and stands for user experience and a lot of the times this gets mistaken because to me focusing on user experience has to be from a whole perspective and when i say that i don't mean user interface i don't mean user flow on the portal i don't mean visual design only i am talking about the whole user experience of everyone in your organization so when coming up with a solution in a project you have to keep that in mind if you're looking for someone to develop requirements blindsided without taking into consideration all of the implications of it i'm probably not your person and another user experience designer it's probably not going to be your person either i am the one you go to if you are looking to be guided from start to finish in your implementation journey and are willing to let me truly understand your organization needs research gaps on the processes between your departments offer strategies to maximize the collaboration between different silos and mainly come up with strategies to optimize your user adoption i know that we always say in the space especially in servicenow your reports are only as good as your data right but i like to say that your applications are only as good as their user adoption think about service portal for example it's common knowledge that keeping some aspects into consideration such as the easiness of use branding of the page to align with your company standards for example and simplifying the end user experience all of those are crucial but what about the users that are approving those tasks and what about the users that are fulfilling those tasks and the users that are left with managing the new implementation down the road their user experience success is just as important and to me this is where i like to say that my expertise lives in and it's what i would like to be known for and help out leading in this niche having that front-end experience and the way you approach projects the way you do offers you an unique perspective in the ecosystem and i wonder if you could share with the audience any kind of trends that you're seeing or you know maybe peer into the crystal ball a little bit and what do you see coming i believe that no matter what there has been a trend with service portal where without discussion it is and it has been highly in demand and more and more customers want to implement it but now especially because we have an entire new number of employees in organizations that are seeing themselves needing to work from home for the first time many times so we need now more than ever portability and the ability of doing things not only remotely but on the go which means mobile friendly and portal is a great tool to leverage that companies are looking to centralize department as well i see that as a trend and they're looking to have their silos and employees to feel more connected so customers are looking at everything when it comes to digital transformations it is interesting to see it now robert because some of those companies have had a head start in this path such as let's say domino's pizza for example which migrated from being a pizza company to a technology first pizza company and you can say disney which has had the release of disney plus or even lemar which is a company that i had the pleasure to lead the architecture on that has also invested tremendously in shifting to become a technology company that happens to build homes instead of just a home building company so now we see ourselves in this new scenario where everyone else that has been postponing those efforts suddenly can't wait and are looking to bring in digital transformation into their corporations as soon as possible and the amazing thing about servicenow is that we have enough tools to make this a possibility in the short term in limitless ways what's one thing that you wish for the servicenow platform i think that while you're asking a ux specialist so this is a loaded question i think i have two answers for this one of them being there's some specific features that i would like to see in the platform and i'm going to be honest and perhaps a little selfish about this feature that i want i would like to be able to work on multiple scopes of work in the instance on one single update set creation so that if i'm working on a story and have an update set created in my scope and now i want to tweak something on a different record that belongs to a different scope the system would let me do that with a click of a button and then how to create a child update set for me and speed up that process i say this because i actually play with a workaround on this i usually create a ui action to be able to force data into update sets i think a lot of us do that and when you're actually working with this it actually it's pretty cool because if you click on force to update sat while working on a different scope of work that would actually create a child update set for you with the same update set name that you're working on as a child a big side of that and that's kind of what i wish you'd be out of the box pretty soon the second part of your question is how do i see servicenow going in the future i think servicenow is already taking a lot of steps into enhancing their user experience it's amazing to see all of the new features and the path that it has taken in the past few years i still think that there are things that could be even more improved from a fulfiller perspective i work with a lot of customers that for example when implementing knowledge base sometimes you have challenges figuring out how to even maintain a knowledge base and checking out articles and republishing them simple things that still requires a lot of training and with user experience being such a hot topic right now i definitely see servicenow going more in that direction where at some point it's going to be a tool that you just turn on and install and figure out how to use it kind of like an iphone all right so for a lot of the people watching that are kind of younger in their surface now career what advice would you offer them i think learn as much as you can first around the basics and then focus on something you want to work on i believe that many times people try to learn everything at the same time and that can be overwhelming so keep that in mind that it's okay to not have the same knowledge as this or this other person that have been working for a longer time in the platform each one of us brings different skill sets to the table and once you find out where your strengths lay take advantage of that and trust yourself awesome tais it was such a pleasure having you on thanks again for taking the time for me thank you so much it has been a pleasure if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching