[Music] hey welcome to service sharp this is a podcast all about service now we will be talking strategy architecture technology just everything service now we are not affiliated with service now the opinions expressed our own weird just a couple of people that are very passionate about the platform so hope you'll join us for every episode and without further ado here we go this podcast was made with anchor anchor is the easiest way to create and publish your podcast it's free creation tools with it allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer helps you distribute your podcast it's super simple to publish to Spotify Apple podcast Google Play any of the major ones you can make money from your podcast there's no minimum listenership so they make it super easy to Mon signs it's really everything you need to make a podcast in one place so why don't you go out and download the free anchor app or go to anchor FM and get started now alright this is Jason Gibson we're back with server sharp and I have Randy Haas and Brent Peters on the call with me right now and we're going to be discussing the New York upgrade and kind of upgrades in general to decide to help you with your you know future steps all right so Brent Randy welcome I guess the first question we want to start with is what we've found while while doing the upgrades for to New York and kind of issues we've been that we've had and talk about any like best practices as well while work while we're at it but so New York I'm it is a big upgrade for us I don't know Burnett was it was it a big upgrade for you guys to it wasn't too bad for us because we've tried to stay as close to out of the box for our stuff but I wasn't too bad were you out did you end up skipping a version or did you go straight or go from Madrid to New York yeah we went from Madrid to New York so we did not skip this stuff so yeah yeah so my the this last one that I've did was I actually skipped Madrid and went straight to New York I think that made it a bigger upgrade mainly because you have all the ads the things that people wanted the the mobile the agent workspace the you know they wanted a lot of things configured and so this ends up being a huge upgrade and mainly because they wanted so many things that the newer versions and of course we could have taken it slower and you know done the upgrade and then launched agent workspace then launched the mobile then launched but instead what we've done is we've taken a little longer with the upgrade and rolled in agent workspace the mobile app the outlook the outlook integration so there's a lot of things they wanted in this upgrade so what do you think of that when do you do you like what one other things in or do you do you like just independently doing the upgrade on its own merit each time um I usually do in or do the upgrades and then you know if there's new features that we would like in the organization or the organization would like the new features we do with some consideration though if there are huge new options new plugins that kind of stuff then we kind of do them in a in a phased approach we do the upgrade and then we go do them but you know some of the new options like in this one you've got you they had the the agent in Madrid but in this one they have the new mobile app for your customers we're gonna go ahead and blow that one out during the upgrade - and and let the customers start using that so it depends on the size and the effort is going to take but yeah we've we've done both so what do you like do you think that it clouds it too much because right now I've got we have so much that we've moved to do this last upgrade that it seemed to complicate and make the the water significantly more murky in the process but I don't know I've also I also like to add things in there so people see the the positives they see you know that the things of changing and getting better and you know that's always a good thing to show your customers that you're making improvements on a continuous basis every upgrade you know right and doing an upgrade the customer or the users are gonna want to see how you upgraded what what new things started I mean why are we upgrading it and all this so yeah it is good to put some new stuff in there but you know putting too much kind of over like you said clouds it up or makes it difficult for the end users because there's so much change it kind of confuses some of them so it there's a there's a limit between the two but I've done both when we first went live we live with many many years ago we went live with five different other modules and that really confused a lot of people but you know they they caught on and we moved on from there but when you do an upgrade it's not always nice to see oh here's a new feature so turning them on is a something I like to do but if it's gonna be really difficult or requires a lot of training on the back end that kind of stuff for your users we take a little slower approach on those things but it's nice to have good or have new features turned on when you do upgrades and it depends on your team size so you know I'm lucky in the fact that this last one you know we were able to have one person doing training with the service desk and focusing on making sure they understood workspace and doing the more administrative side of things and making sure things are done and doing some small configuration well we had you know three other people doing development so you know that has been nice but we are enabling 13 plugins and we have over 35 update sets so it's a lot and with so many people in so many hands and so many update sets when when we moved it to test I had to they you know initially I had that one of my developers go in and start committing the update sets well they didn't do it in the perfect order so we got a bunch error so I had to have the it you know rolled back and re cloned and re upgraded because he didn't get it done in the right order and it was a little off and that really messed things up and so it's very important if you're gonna do a large upgrade like this to make sure you document every single step the things that you did first you know the things that you worked on first and make sure and do current child relationships with the base sets so when you move it over they move over together and they're in there you know it just it overall it makes it a lot easier when you're talking about something like mobile having to do several different update sets each one in a different scope you know right and you you nailed it right there it doesn't matter if there's one of you or there's 35 of you doing this upgrade you've got to have documented steps of what you did and what you need to do the day you move over to another instance you got to make sure okay we got to have these plugins enabled we have to these update sets this is the order of the updates that need to go in kind of stuff it it doesn't matter if you are one or 35 you need to all be on the same page when you're doing that it like you like you found out it is it can be a pain if you don't do it in the right air order and then you got also have planned tests how you're going to test what you're testing who you're testing as that's one of the things I've run into with a lot of developers and admins when they're testing they test is themselves only no you can't you have to test as end-users you have to test as IT users you have to test is approvers that kind of stuff so you got to keep all the roles in mind of who you're going to test at as do ATF's help a lot with that the automatic testing that the ATF's do is is actually really great we have everything down on this last upgrade we had everything down everything had an ATF associated with it including the integrations including the the main modules including all the catalog items so everything has a an ATF and they ran the 80s and I go okay they're like okay we're done and I'm like no and they didn't and for a while they didn't understand because like no yes we ran the 80s now we need to do a sanity check and so even if you run the ATF's you still need to go through have a person go through and check things you don't have to create as many you know but you still need a human being to double and triple check things before you you move for if you want to move it to production and not have any errors right right because ATF's is pretty much you script those to be a perfect scenario every time so it's this person logs in they do this exact same thing every time and then they transfer the ticket to someone and they do their update and so on but it's a perfect scenario each time if you get a human factor in there they're gonna do things a little bit different they might not follow that perfect scenario and they might find hey you know if I go in and I right click at the top and it save it doesn't do the same thing as if your that your other thing did or whatever so I always I have other admins and developers test my upgrades to but then I get other IT users that use the system to also do to my testing for me because I find hey I open the tickets the way it was developed but if I get Suzy Q over here in the application Department to try oh she goes a totally different way and does it this way and if she's doing it that way other people could be so well you always have that one person that has a propensity to breaking things so you're like set them loose there are two users that I used to usually always pick on my current organization that have a tendency to find the weirdest ways around the system and try to burn not did they try to break it but they find the weirdest ways around and they always find issues and it's like hey there we go we'll fix that so yeah ATF's are great just for initial testing but yeah you do have to go and get some in some hands in the system so that you can make sure it's really gonna work yeah absolutely yes it's important also test scripts are really important to have for your testers so you know one of the you know one of the things that we spent I've spent the last year or so making sure has been done is gotta have testing scripts gotta have ATF's gotta have all the processes and all the policies together you know you need an upgrade policy you need a cloning apology you need to be able to refer back and say this is the policy we're gonna follow and this is the the structure that we're going to have for our upgrades and you know the everybody thinks I'm a little bit a little bit over the top with that but I think it's super important for us to all understand here's the process here's why the process exists and here's what we're going to do and not flying by the seat of our pants but have them have a plan and follow the plan yes exactly and we kind of skipped around or skipped past it but before you start doing the upgrade you should always read the release notes service and I was great at you know documenting those they also have an upgrade plan that you know you can always go through and look at - it's usually the same but I've noticed in the past two or three upgrades they've added a few things or suggested more things but your test plans as you pointed out are yeah you can use the same test plans upgrade after upgrade but you do need to review them make sure that they still are relevant to the new upgrade and that if you need to add any new features to your update or any new features you want tested in your test plans and that kind of stuff it also goes back to your overall development philosophy at your organization and your overall development process you need to have a development process not everybody go randomly creating stuff you need to have a defined process to where they're going to create a catalog item but then they're going to create an ATF then they're gonna create test scripts all before it goes live in a KB and you know those are the three things that you need to do that are not even associated with the the catalog item just so people understand what to do and once that's created the test scripts in the ATF you don't have to do it again and now they'll modify it you got to go change them I've felt more like well I didn't remember to do that yeah now I have a question on your test scripts because we kind of we're talking about those how detailed are you on your test scripts do you tell them you know go here do this click this fill out these fields or do you just do a test script that says you need to test opening a change or instant or whatever and give them generic kind of stuff how do you do it so I do more generic I don't go too far into it I do tell them to to the basics like create an incident with a normal chain or create an incident create a priority higher priority incident create a lower priority incident create a normal change create a standard change that kind of stuff right I don't go so specific that I say go create it with this the CI go create it with you know that kind of thing but and give them a little bit of information on each one but I try not to have it more than say 10 different steps you know okay see that's what I do our our implementer eight or nine years ago when our implementer was doing this they gave us test scripts that said go here click on this put in your name pick the CI and so on they were very specific so the being new to service now and the upgrades and all I went ahead in the next upgrade I gave I just updated those that test script gave it to our customers and they followed them exactly and nothing failed but then when we did the upgrade and people started using it well they were having issues here they had issues here not a whole lot but they had a few well it was because they didn't do it the same process so if we we found that if you are a generic like that okay I need you to open an incident but I need you to open a priority one incident a priority 2 priority 3 so on through and then I need normal change emergency and so on if I told them to do those and kind of just left it generic they ended up finding more issues because they weren't following his script they were just doing it their normal day-to-day ways that's when we find out our issues in our development system before we go to prod so it's always nice to find this so I just was wondering what you say don't be upset when they find a huge I've had people get upset when they find issues they're like oh my gosh we have issues with you okay that's that's actually a good thing because we're finding them now exactly yeah eighties broke okay that's fantastic we'll go figure out why it's broken figure out what broken and we can do that in in our dev environments and test environments before and that's but I've seen people get so upset that something's not working right and it's like listen that's why we have a dev that's why we have a test we're gonna get problems and we want to figure out all those possible problems before you know before it goes to production and our customers are finding the problems Forks Devon tests is four problems fix them there so you don't have one production yeah I could see where some people would get you know oh my I did my best on this development in this code and everything and they're critiquing it because as they said it didn't work I can see where people could get offended that from that but that's not how it is you did your best you put all your work in there you might affect fingered something you might have you know thought okay well my process is this way and then they went and did it a different way and found a different error that could have been out of the box so don't take it personally just fix it right you know I mean we all get ownership on what we do yes we do and we all want it to be as perfect as possible but it you know when you're when you're in Brent and i's level we understood you know we understand that my codes not always perfect i can't really expect yours if you're a junior developer or developer you know to be perfect every time that's why we have this what's why we have code reviews that's why we have these conversations and that's why we do training you know is because we're none of us are perfect and so that ownership is great but you have to be flexible and you have to say okay we did this upgrade I built this additional module in the mobile app right because that's a basically what's what's been happening is every time I we do an upgrade for a customer that that we turn on the mobile app it doesn't have enough stuff right it has incident but then have changed enough tasks right yeah doesn't have some of the things they want so they want that built on and so you get that built on and it gets over and you go to the next deal and it just locks up and you're like okay so we need to fix that you know it's no big deal who cares right it's not it's not the production yet so yep and I will say in New York they did at because you brought up mobile New York they did add quite a few out-of-the-box applications for mobile and agent so the I don't know that you're using project in your instances that you're supporting but the project the instances I am have project and the new project app on agent actually works quite well pm's don't take this offensive anyone but if pm's are a little picky on what they want them to do and so they might have issue with it but I mean it's got all the info there needs so it's great out of the box even yeah I mean it's so and that's another thing you know everybody's vest invested in their own work but we're not building it for them and that's the one thing I've had a hard time especially with you know agent work space is one of those you know keeping it generic enough for any agent to use it and allowing them to build in and this is what I've been trying to preach in agent workspaces build it out to what the general number of people are going to be using it and then allow them to build their own lists that they've got that capability so we've we've we've often this done ok so we're gonna build the basics and then we're gonna teach you how to build a to build on to that and I found that people have been really excited about that with New York yes yeah and that's the nice thing about service now but you have to do it to the general use of how everybody's going to use it and then the users can go in it doesn't matter if it's agent workspace or their work use or you know the home page or whatever they can go in and customize those as long as you're you have your system open enough for them to do that some some people like s lock it down completely I haven't ran into an instance like that but I've I've heard where oh no we don't don't let our customers or our users even add columns to our their lists or anything and some of the MSP systems the the service plans the some of those are so restricted they don't let any anybody do anything that's one of the you know I always lead people away the best I can is like stay away from the managed service stuff it's just not in most people's best interest stay with a staff augmentation hire an external company to come in and do implementations hire an implementation company whatever you can to do that additional staff but those manage service you know programs are there they're really not that great I wouldn't ever recommend one because it's too restrictive and they're typically in one single instance with multiple customers using domain separation and that's just that's just a bear of a system to manage so because of that you tend to have more problems than you do if you just go get your own instance and then hire an implementer to do so yeah I haven't ran into any manage systems yet [Laughter] notoriously difficult to utilize but there are some that are structurally different when you get your own instance those are better but I'm always a fan of just going straight to ServiceNow and getting them to take it you set up on an instance and then making sure that you get a really good implementer not necessary yeah not necessarily one of the big partners I mean I hate to say this but I've worked with some of the largest partners in service now and I've not been impressed and I've worked with some smaller ones that were more local that honestly we're pretty amazing so don't let the size of of it be the deciding factor quality and cost really are going to be the deciding factors there when selecting it and just make sure that you you do your research as far as that is you're working for it if you have somebody local and I just I have I have a fondness for being able to see and sit in front of people so I always prefer people who are our local anyway now to spin that towards the upgrade part if you have a good implementer that's steers you in the right ways the best practices and everything then that helps you in your future upgrades too because if they're coming in and they're putting all this custom stuff in just because that's how they always implement that's gonna make your upgrades a lot harder but if they come in and they listen to you and they're good implementer and they're like okay this is best practice which most of out of the boxes we can customize sooner we can configure some of this to be the way your company needs without a lot of customization then your upgrades are gonna be a lot cleaner and a lot easier in the future plus I'm the good I'm finding that the implements come in the big implementers come in and they start they start with prepackaged stuff so I'm definitely done before they just start and I'm still I have I have a customer that I'm still yanking crap out of their instance that got put in there they have nothing to do with what the implement or came in there to do it's like they implemented incident and all of a sudden there a whole bunch of you know additional stuff in there that has nothing to do with incident and you know they they you know they implement you know the incident and all of a sudden now why is why has problem changed you know that's not out of the box now now I've got to back out a whole bunch of crap that that that I didn't want to begin with so yeah hey be careful with that as well oh yeah I see that a lot with the implementers that come in and and or just general consultants in ite also do the same thing they come in and they go well we've got this tool that does this we've got this tool that does that and and it sounds like oh that's amazing because it makes everything so easy I don't have to I don't have to think about these decisions and stuff like that but the truth is it's just prepackaged crap like what you you know you buy a PC and the first thing you do is have to uninstall all the crap that they install the limit if you want to perform well yeah the first thing you have to do is uninstall all the extra bloatware well that's exactly what's happening with a lot of these implementers and a lot of these IT people that come in and do you know we have this tool that that does this it's just you know we have a pre-selected set of things that we think works best for one customer that was really happy with us and so we're gonna force it on everybody else and yeah you gotta be careful about that I think I like what Bren said that you know if an implementer actually listens to you and is they need to be looking at what is going to work for your company not what has worked for other companies in the past not what has worked for other clients that may not work the same way or have the same amount of resources or the same organizational structure the same organizational culture because I mean let's face it service now is is software that supports the people doing the business it's not something that does the business for you and so it should be set up with your company culture in mind and your you know your your specific size and capabilities rather than just this as you know this is what we like to just run this script and turn everything on and then charge you 100 hours for the 13 minute script and leave everything broken and that's week yep yeah I've seen that several times our implementer when we implemented my original system that I support all the time that one they listened to us and they mainly built everything from scratch there are a few things they put in that I didn't agree with from well well we used this to other customers but in the long run those that stuff has actually turned out to be pretty good except for that one workflow well yes except for yes putting one workflow and then trying to make every request through that every catalog item work on that same workflow that was a stupid thing but there are some other things that that they did do that I liked but I've I've removed all the stupid stuff they did but then there's one kind that I'm currently working on they'd never even thought about doing change they didn't have the implementer touch change but they came in and when they implemented their incident and request stuff I guess their huge update set that they put in modified all kinds of stuff and change so I've had to go back and reset and build from scratch there so yeah it's a pain in the backside for that kind of stuff yeah it makes upgrades bad you think you have to listen you pay a significant amount of money for that system it pay for somebody to come in and do it right don't don't be cheap about that and spend a million dollars for the system but spend 20 cents on implementing it you need to make sure and again this is just from my personal experience that they go oh what we're gonna buy it we're gonna implement it and then they go out and they find the absolute cheapest person they can find implemented then all of a sudden they wonder why it's not working they're like oh well the system just must be clear well fine you know what I found is they either find that cheapest person they can find because budget is their primary concern or they go with the biggest name that they can find because Gartner is the only thing they listen to yeah you know not saying that either one of those is wrong you could find really good people at the low end of the cost factor I mean you can find really good partners at the top end of the spectrum but the the key is they've got to listen to you you know not every tool that's out there is bad or or in maliciously intent but you know they've got to listen to you and it's got to be tailored to what you're trying to do and not touch things that you're not trying to do like Bret said you know don't let them don't let them install a tool that's going to change a whole bunch of modules that you're not even implementing yet because they're gonna cause you to have to go back through and do it and you don't only use man either yeah you don't want that company that says yes to everything right yeah you want to challenge your thinking in the end you want to do it that you don't do don't get me wrong really you want a partner that about your losses to the point that they you know we're willing to point out and say that's not best practice and here's why and we're willing to back up you know that that's saying rather than just you know no we're gonna run this script we're gonna we're gonna do this and that's that's what you get I work with an implement or one that I go what is best practice on this and they go whatever you want yeah yeah no we're talking about implementers but all of this about the information implementers that we're talking about keeping in mind and all that that could be for any kind of consulting that you have come in for your system it's not just the implementers if you're having somebody come in and help you with this practice on change or you have someone come in to revamp how your your service portal looks or whatever always go with somebody or always have a partner that is going to say hey you know here's best practice what do you think what do you will work in your organization work with you not just hey here's I may install this update set and it's going to do every you ever want to do yeah exactly well and that goes back to the upgrades because if you if you do best practice if you stay outside the box the best you can if you do those things upgrading is not going to be so burdensome and that's where that's where you really have to focus your attention into maintaining one of the other things that we haven't talked about yet when it comes to upgrades and and it's very very very important when you're doing an upgrade the very first thing you do is on a code level inspect all the skipped items you want oh yeah enroll everything back down at the box that you can and I'll tell you a lot of the Phinn reason huh within reason you got to watch and make sure you're not putting in overwriting stuff that you've put in because you have a special process right but yeah you got a you gotta watch those skipped items and make sure it's a good you know use it as a discipline time to go through and review and make sure you still need those things rather than just yes rather than just say oh yeah there's one just gift items next yeah ignore those those are skipped because we customized all that you're right going back and reviewing and saying do we really need this or the new functionality they're trying to implement with their script is that going to be better that kind of stuff yeah yeah one of the coolest thing about reviewing the skipped items not only can you review the code you can review the change so you can actually review both what what it is today and what it is we're after the change side-by-side and and see the difference and decide like they're one of the biggest things in this in in the New York edition that you're gonna find we skipped remember we skipped from Madrid on this last one one of the biggest things I found is because they added the new roles anything we had touched to had a role that was we had to roll back to add a box in order to utilize the new functionality of having the more specific for incident change those kind of things right yep and now I long that lines when we first went live CMDB was locked down that only admins and CMDB admin could see it there were no views for anybody else so we built a custom view d'lai Wow our out I tell users to see certain parts of the CMDB and you know that kind of stuff so see eyes I noticed I don't remember which upgrade it was main F I have this CMDB view role so you can give users that role and they can view it and it it made it so much easier well Jane that upgrade I did the skipped items and ice had to roll back to that kind of stuff so I could take that custom work out and go back with out of the box so they could see the view that kind of stuff when we do an upgrade that's one less thing we're gonna have to look at yeah well we talked about review all your skipped items what's fun is that's doable when you have a hundred and five skipped items when you have 10,000 skipped items it's not really doable I'm telling you I ran the oldest most customized instance in the state of Oklahoma maybe the country it was the third instance that ServiceNow third customer service now ever had and it was old it was antiquated that was everything was customized it was horrible and we still we would review every single one of them but we would roll back anywhere from 800 to 1200 skipped items every time we go to an upper that's great I've never had skipped items over I think five or six hundred so now I would suggest that if you have a bunch of skipped items in there I mean I would have to say if you have a thousand or more 500 it's not hard to look at 600 whatever just takes time but if you have a thousand a nice thing about their skipped items saying when you go to review them they prioritize them these are the highest ones you need to look at well go ahead and look if you don't have the time or you need to go through quickly or whatever review all the ones twos and threes fours and fives you could probably leave but then the next upgrade you need to address those fours and fives I mean there are ways around it but always address your ones twos and threes I would say I would suggest I'd agree you know I hate seeing customers that just ignore those skipped items and keep moving forward because I mean you're really you're really thrown away one of the big advantages of service now is dev cycle you know by saying yeah you guys release a new major release every six months but we want to keep everything the way it was you know so we're just gonna well one of the things I've found is that if you look at the fours and fives you'll have a whole bunch of those fours and fives that are that are that are the same as it is out of the box yeah yeah I've noticed that too it's like I I was reviewing mine for my New York upgrade last week or no this week it was like Tuesday and I got to the fours of highs and there were some of them that were exactly the same stuff across except for in the script there were a couple spaces in there that mine didn't have or whatever it's like really but still yeah yep but it also was that I'd never touched those files right those had last modified and created by admin and when I went and looked at the new one it was admin so it was really kind of weird we had never touched them so I don't know why they did that but yeah there are some form fives it did show up that way yeah it was quite interesting and you'll find though that if you do it right and you keep on it and you keep upgrading correctly and the other thing is don't be afraid to postpone a patch you're gonna have to when you're upgrading you're gonna have to contact I've had seen this mistake happen multiple time when you're in the middle of an upgrade you don't want to patch to a different level for example they're packed we're and we're in say we're in dev and we're on patch 3 and then they get press for is scheduled to happen on on on tests and on dev and you don't know though don't be afraid to submit it together and postpone that to a later date because you don't want to be patchy and retesting everything right there the person I was talking to is like oh no we'll just patch we don't need to retest something no if you patch you're retesting everything so yes yeah and ServiceNow is made it so easy they give you the change number and as the customer you can go in the change on the hi-hi site and change the date I don't want it I can't do it this day so let's do it this date so even if you they say you're gonna upgrade to or they're gonna patch your production system to Madrid level 5 or whatever it is now and you're upgrading that weekend and then they're planning on doing that patch on Monday not a good time frame the but anyways they're playing on doing it you can reschedule it and put a note in there that says hey by the way I'm upgrading to New York on this date so the patch might need to be done and they'll read 8th your your change with the new patch so though they'll even go oh wait you're up to the newest patch they'll cancel the change but they decide all that stuff so but you can do all that and the change oh that's what I usually do it no it's not I couldn't think off my head when was the best time for them to patch or when do they patch they usually do it like Wednesday or Thursday I think a good day for us because you I have found that Thursday night there's a lot of people not there on Fridays most time most places you know and now it all depends on your organization sometimes you need to do it Friday night after everybody's gone because you you've got too many people in the system the entire time and but but I find that a lot of times Thursday night is a good night well Oregon is some organizations are I mean especially 24-hour seven-day-a-week organizations have certain windows that you have to do this stuff in and so you know if you're patching your system and there's a chance that it's down which knock on wood that doesn't usually happen with service now you want a patch you have to patch in that window so you can also tell them nope I got to do this during my patch windows so it's Thursday local time of 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. so you can do it in that 2 hour period and they they're flexible they do that yeah it helps I've never seen them cause any issues as far as that goes they want to work with you yeah I will say one more thing you if you need to postpone a patch more than 30 days you can't do it on the high portal but don't fret you can change it you just have to you just have to submit a high ticket and ask them to postpone it more than 30 days this last upgrade because it was so massive and we had Christmas and everything in between and ended up taking more time than well I took about this about the time we expected but there was a patch that came in right about the beginning of it so we had to push that patch out and we didn't want it to happen directly after production upgrade the day after actually was 30 days so we just submit a high ticket hey can you move it out another couple weeks which doesn't give us a tremendous amount of time but a couple couple weeks I guess is as good as is adequate oh it's better than the day after that would be bad so awesome guys you know I think it boils down to you know go slow to no get ahead of yourself reviewers shipped items make sure to test well have a plan document its plan and listen you you can do an upgrade in two weeks you can I wouldn't add any additional functionality like like I wouldn't configure any new modules at that point to get it done but if you have all the if you have a well documented process well documented plan and you're just doing the upgrade you could get another two or three weeks yeah but that's not like he said not implementing anything new all it's doing is going from one version up and yeah you can do that in two weeks you can implement new stuff too it's just a really good team yeah I can I can say most of my upgrades usually take and I'm usually the only one focusing on it so they usually take about a month but which is good because this old system I used to do took six months time great so this was great and you know really don't get into the hang-up about how quick or how slow it has to be do it right for your exactly yep disciplined in the way you set it up so that you're progressively getting better every time because if you're disciplined and you and you document and you figure out what didn't work and and what did work then every single cycle you're going to be improving that upgrade time anyways right it comes down to do it correctly the first time take whatever time you need to if you need to postpone it most the organization will understand especially if you say well if I deploy it tomorrow it's all going to be broken or if you give me an extra week and deploy the upgrade then I can have everything fixed it will work fine most of the time they'll take that I would think I gotta say New York especially there is there is so much additional functionality that you can bring to the table if you're doing the New York don't try and do that one in two weeks you know go ahead and take your time bring in and get some of the new functionality to your customers because those things are gonna keep them wanting more from service now I find that if you're in front of them bringing new functionality they're gonna think about you when they go to things like security incident right when somebody needs something but if if you're not bringing new stuff back to the table and you're not constantly moving forward with the platform people will come to you as easily and ask you to do other things I agree but that's my two cents man the upgrades are awesome twice a year Brent what do you think once a year twice a year it depends on your organization and how susceptible they are or how well they received the changes but I usually do two a year it's better than when they were doing three releases a year so they're a lot more stable now used to they would do the winter spring summer and they would it's going to be out on the state no matter what if it's broken I don't care send it out and they used to do that now with the new you know starting from Aspen on and they - a year they've been pretty solid I haven't seen many issues over this last eight or nine years that I've been doing that yeah I will say that they in and I think there's been huge improvements in upgrades over the last 30 cents Geneva Geneva was kind of a clunky one I don't know if you thought that way too but Geneva seemed like a kind of a kind of clunky upgrade and even going from Aspen to Pillar that Berlin really yes so yeah I mean those upgrades were still you know going along they've just gotten better over the years a lot easier back then they didn't have the hey review these skipped items kind of things so yeah and watch the upgrade monitor er you know even though you don't you can you can just review things after it's kind of cool to watch it go through and and in and do the upgrade I don't know if you guys are an admin listening or a developer and you haven't watched an upgrade and watched the the monitor while the upgrades going on new do it it's it's actually really pretty neat they've got a great visualization and and in I always watch it because I am anal retentive so hey I've always watched them and it's kind of neat to watch the databases because they have little pictures of the databases none of them go down then they go a different color and then they come up in their green because they've been upgraded and you can see all I'm going across and all that stuff it's kind of interesting watch the statistics across there but I'm just kind of a weird person like that but apparently so Jason I don't know it's interesting watch all that but it's also interesting or it's good to watch all that because then you if anything ever happens you're right there and you can you know jump on it but yeah that's always fun I will have say watch the monitor when it says upgrade completed before you do anything log out log back in so you get all the new look and features and everything because it just it's weird it just seems like it's sometimes weird if you don't because things don't always come across like you think they would so have you seen the new UI for the visual task boards no I'll have to go look at it go look for the visual task boards if you haven't if you just an upgrade or doing an upgrade then honestly the New York regional task for their really cool new visualization the and you can configure them a lot more you can configure swim lanes vertically instead of horizontally as well and you can they have themes so you can change your entire color palette which is kind of cool and so you have the really cool stuff coming in in New York with with the facial taps boards if you use them I use them a lot so I was kind of excited about that but and if you're a scrum person and yeah in a an agile person that's why I use it is because I think it's it's very helpful in that way so I think I'm always excited to see what else comes out what's new and what what happens oh yeah I love having the new stuff and going oh that's pretty cool and implementing it and and everything it's also pretty cool I implemented I don't remember which one it was but you could turn your home homepage into a dashboard and so I implemented that but I didn't tell anybody I did it it was just part of the upgrade and all and next thing I know all these people have dashboards and stuff it was pretty cool yeah well and we have stuff that you know there's there's a lot of changes and one of the things in New York that I think was a ens additional functionality it with the mobile with agent with with all of that different stuff but they have a lot of like dashboard improvements and and some things like that that's really great some improvements with a major incident for those of you that use major incident and major incident communications so there's there's a lot of really good improvements in New York is there anything Brent or Andy that is struck you with the most latest releases as far as I can coolest really you know thing that you've seen hmm I'm thinking I like some of the new stuff our new updates they've made to the scalable agile but we're just starting to mess with that so I haven't seen a whole lot of that stuff but I the scoping stuff right and being able to create a scope application and blow at the global scope I thought that was cool yeah that could be dangerous but yeah yeah well yeah I could yeah exactly well but but you know I like to live on the wild side so yep I'm just gonna be honest and say I was messed with me well well I have only spent two weeks in it so yeah the mobile apps experience in New York that's crazy I know anything I'm feeling pretty good right now I really do like the new mobile app I don't know if my custer's we use it but I do like that I like that they broke it out agent and customer so because you know the reality is what do you build it for well you know if you're most of the previous mobile apps you're building for a customer I like that they have an agent one so you can you know be remote and you know closing and closing an incident or yeah yeah or all that or easily reassigning it or you know whatever your heart content wants because you can build everything you want in there but because that it is nice that when you're building the agent stuff or the mobile stuff that they're scoped apps so they're not gonna affect other things so it's kind of nice it also has its downsides but it's nice that it doesn't get affected that much so if you build a custom mobile app to do I don't know your task boards or whatever and they're it's it's easier to upgrade and not affect it so well especially then you know since mobile this mobile is pretty new that you're gonna have major improvements in Orlando you're gonna have major improvements and then the next 3-4 versions so a lot of those things that you're building those whether it's change putting change in it or putting other those are going to be available in later versions and so what you're gonna have to do is just turn off the your the app that you created and go with out-of-the-box you know oh yeah yep that makes that easier - yeah it does much easier so but it's it's it's pretty awesome it also I like the location services stuff and I like the fact that you can actually build things into the mobile app that will allow you to get the location of the mobile one while doing it I know some people hate that but it could be very useful in building mobile apps for us oh it could be useful if you have well especially since one of the apps is field services location and that kind of stuff so you know it you could use all kinds of things with that so your desktop support guy shows up at I one of these buildings you could in theory built and it might be I haven't researched it it come up and say hey by the way there's ten more tickets in this area if you want to take a look at them yeah plus if they if they come out you can actually with interestingly enough with Field Services you can actually see where they're at and assign it to and actually esada assign it to them because they're the closest yeah so I mean those things are just really invaluable and field services is something I think that is an application and service now and is completely underutilized yeah I pointed it out I'm not actually using it so I'll need to I need to look into it but it's definitely good happen it's in it with all the new stuff coming it's gonna be better and better and better as you go so as far as that's concerned I would I would definitely look into that I've been impressed with a lot of the new stuff so it's it's one of those things that we don't have enough time on this call where we're pushing the the timeframe that we have anyway but if you haven't taken a look at some of the new functionalities and you saw a demo of one of the applications three years ago and you thought that wasn't very good I'm not gonna go look at it now because the way ServiceNow does it they bring it out kind of yeah but then over you know a couple of years it's now the premier you know product in the market yeah they they really do quickly improve things it's it's very it's very cool that you know sometimes people do a quick release cycle like what ServiceNow does but there's no real discernible good stuff that comes out of it but ServiceNow you know I remember with project we looked at it and underwhelmed and you know one release later it was like a whole new a whole new application you know yeah almost everything we complained about when we when we looked at the first demo had been addressed or was set up to be addressed in the next release and so don't be afraid to revisit you know be revisit things that you've looked at in the past because they will change they will get better they're pretty passionate about improving oh yeah I I think they I don't know for effect but it looks that seems like there's always a change in almost every module for the upgrade it might not be a huge change but it's some kind of hey we're gonna start adding this or whatever I mean something small to it but there's usually always something changing in the modules and good example project like he said it was not a very good thing when we looked at it first but well it was not very elaborate and then whenever we go back a couple years later it had what we wanted plus more and it was like oh my gosh we can start doing things and using it correctly so it it was great because a lot of also what they what they update our feedback items you know they listen to exactly yep your feedback and a lot of things that change or based on feedback at least it seems like it yeah you know I know it's gotta be because it's it's like it is the things that are most talked about that in them getting changed so you know they've got to be listening as well you know and I find that if you if you like the product and you implement it you just are going to continuously get better product and you're not gonna be disappointed and it's not gonna go stale like some of the other products you would buy where there's other products getting better and yours is not right right and if if they're not better right now they will be that if you look at a module and it's you know it'll work for you but you want these other functionalities most likely you're going to get it the next upgrade or two they do have great upgrade cycles and they do the feedback is is listened to it seems like that also leads me to another point stop building stuff in just because you don't have it look at the next version look at the version after that they start releasing this information you start understanding talk to your reps what are they gonna come up with I have a lunch meeting with my with my ServiceNow rep on Monday what do you think I'm gonna be doing they've been at the sales conference for a week I'm gonna be Pro him on everything they're coming up with you know I won't yeah I know everything because that way I'm not wasting my time building something that already exists or in between on that you know I think definitely if you look at it and you go yeah they've got it on the roadmap and it's coming out in the very next release and you can wait then go ahead and do that but if you need it don't be afraid to build it just don't get too attached right be mailing to pull it back out as soon as it's a you know an out of the box key yes that's true because you can always most likely take whatever data you collected and migrate it to their module some way I mean it might be that somebody manually inputs six months worth of stuff but you could I mean it's all tables and everything you can migrate that data over you're not gonna lose it just don't spend a lot of time on it in that case it's something you absolutely have to have you know check with somebody who's done several of those you know moving the data forward yes that is definitely one of those things that you're just you're not gonna get the experience if you're not know sometimes the consultant is very good because they see so many different yeah they've done other things that normally an admin wouldn't have right so that's a very good use case for definitely check with somebody that that has demonstrated trust worthiness well yes but you also if you build the app and you decide not to move the data over if the app still in your system you just disable it from everybody's seeing it they use the new one and you have the historical in your old system so it's not like you have to move it over you have it there but yep well I didn't play with it you can utilize it for something else you can refer back to the code and build something else I mean that's the nice thing about that is you don't have to have it on for it to be be there yep yeah really you know I don't know why these days we're gonna do a podcast where we don't completely fanboy out about it but that might happen sometime but hey that'll happen the same day we don't go down a rabbit trail about something that we're not right that's not over putting the system together with the ability for you to do that to turn that off it still reference and not lose the data but not have it destroy what you're trying to move forward yep for sure well guys I think our I think our time is up I really appreciate appreciate everybody being here Thank You Brent you're you're always an awesome resource Randy thank you so much I got to tell you I'm a little disappointed our our other compete reott justin is not here tonight and for all of the all of you that know Justin feel free to give him a hard time and tell him to get his bottom back on the on the podcast but but I guess I can't blame him he was sick this evening but but yeah hopefully we'll have him on the next one so awesome well thank you guys well thank you sometimes I forget that were that we're on LinkedIn don't forget to leave any comments suggest episodes we'd love to hear from you so don't don't be a stranger yes like like Randy was saying send some questions if you want I mean we're here to answer things yeah yeah and we obviously don't get bored talking about it you would think we would but yeah we don't we love this stuff so don't you know if you have hey I don't know how to do this I actually would love to hear from you I'm on LinkedIn song I rents are you on LinkedIn nope my plant see yeah send it to me and put in the notes you need Brent yeah yeah if we don't know it you know well we'll try to figure it out that's something we like to do as well yeah I mean we know servicenow quite a bit we know you know the I tell process is that kind of stuff I'm learning more about agile and how to say it but about any of that kind of stuff would be nice and we have we have an italics for also that we are very good friends with and so if you have any ideal questions or you want an episode on some sort of ITIL process we'd love to talk about it as well and we can always bring them on so yeah just reach out and let us know what you need and what we can help you with and we will see what we can do all right Thank You room Thanks thank you [Music] you