[Applause] hi everyone thanks for joining and it's sunday evening almost so that pop-up will come again and again so i have to jump back to allow them to join so this is the second chapter of series journey to stars okay so as you remember last time we had a discussion around certifications and how to start so in case you have missed that uh you can i'll share the link for that video in the feedback email but now first let me welcome our special guest robert how are you man ah man i am so good uh i get i gotta say i'm i'm super honored that you uh asked me to join this and uh for all you guys overseas uh in your evenings i just wanna say namaste namaskar namaskaram namaste assalam alaikum and i'm going to butcher this one so firstly thanks for giving us the opportunity to learn from you man it's our pleasure that you are here me allow these folks okay so someone else is left so okay i'll keep a check on them luciano is also joining do you want me to just go ahead with an intro while you're still admitting gusts yeah man uh so i don't want to leave this opportunity right so the way you start in your titan series so let's start from the start okay so where did you get your start and service now thanks um well i was i i joke around and tell people that i was born 12 years ago before that i worked in the itsm tool space working with primitive tools that were similar to servicenow but i was just like some boring kid basically um you know i put in my my work day and then i i went home and did absolutely nothing i had little to no ambition um but something about when i when i first got my hands on servicenow really changed that like i kind of always knew that i was only gonna go so far dealing with itsm tools um and and especially with the state of the itsm tools on the market but then we evaluated servicenow and i suddenly realized i had a much more powerful tool and i could influence the business a lot more i could put my mark on the bottom line a lot more uh than with the tools i was previously operating with so that was like 12 years ago maybe a bit more we were servicenow's first like gigantic customer um and since then i've just really tried to put my heart and soul into the tool that's kind of given my life meaning um and so in that time i've you know i've ranked up in the community i'm number 14 now um i've been a community mvp five times as of this year i'm in the new dev mvp program i've spoken at knowledge seven seven or eight times i've won a few hackathons um but it's all just it's all just because i didn't have a whole lot of meeting before and i have a lot of meeting now and so however i also can help other people just coming on uh that's what i want to do so that is the best part of servicenow community i mean the people i know in the community who are at certain good level i mean in the community as well or they are the developer mp they never say no to hell i mean i've seen other communities as well but this is by far the best experience that i'm having over here so here i've missed something right you're saying you have five times common tmvp okay the numbers kind of blend together after a while i got this from your main list yeah yeah you might want to update that that's okay really like i mean i say those things but i really am just some guy right like i'm not my only advantage is that i got into this 12 years ago right that's the only advantage i have i am not some genius developer i'm not some genius process person i've just been at the game for 12 years uh and i have a big mouth uh that doesn't stop talking that's that's what i was exactly looking for what a great introduction man so before starting so uh this is for the audience okay so we i have divided this uh session in three parts first thing uh based on your registration while you register uh based on your expectations i have figured out four five most probably six questions uh to be asked from robert that would cover the uh almost say 80 to 90 percent of the expectations if uh your question is not answered once we are done with those questions then i'll open the session for open uh open q and a just like we had the last time so you can one to one directly ask your questions from robert or if i would be in a position i would answer but i'll make sure that robert answers the most after the session i'll share in feedback email so the importance of feedback other than we getting a rating would be selecting a topic for the next session as well so we will definitely so robert uh uh let's let's while registering lots of folks were interested up in knowing what is vivid chart is basically about i mean they are quite happy they are quite motivated when i share those uh certificate on vivid charts i really like the app but it would be great if you can give us a go through that app through vivid chart basically yeah um i'm not anticipating screen sharing do you just want to pitch or do you want me to demonstrate it uh if you want to say that would be great um let me think about this my like my pitch about vivid charts is okay me two seconds i wasn't anticipating screen sharing so i'm just gonna set this up super super no fast so in case you don't want to share screen we are totally okay with it [Applause] till then i'll just allow the people to join in the late comers yeah that's okay okay this i'm not gonna go through the full deck but when we're talking about servicenow reporting i like to think of the whole reporting world as revolving around three personas the first persona is the operator persona and i think we've all sat in the operator's seat they're just the people who have to get stuff done and what i what i need as an operator from a reporting perspective is really simple really simple tell me what i need to do and tell me what i should do next and if you want to get this listed stuff done like i don't care about the patterns that i can exploit or the exceptions that i have to reconcile for me it's just what work do i have how fast can i do it or what work do i have um what should i do next okay then we have a level of people called the analysts and the analysts are the people who are there to figure out hey what what are the patterns that we can exploit or anticipate what are the exceptions that we have to reconcile and the tools they need are a lot more complex because i have to take an existing set of data that we haven't determined the story out of and do all kinds of analysis on it and this is where people get either really deep into the base reporting module and or performance analytics now we've just covered everything that servicenow could do um but we've left out one persona and that persona is the stakeholder okay and the stakeholder can be basically anybody but more typically we're talking about senior levels of leadership and those people are under tools they want to be told the story they don't want to be provided an analyst's interface in which to determine the story themselves like if i'm a cio and i tell you go figure out why it's so expensive for us to do asset refreshes every quarter i don't want to have to figure that out myself i want you to figure it out and then go come back to me with an analyst interface giving give me the story and this is why people take tons of data out of their servicenow systems so let's get right to that um and for those who worked in servicenow for any amount of time tell me would it surprise you if i said that the more important the report the more strategic the audience the less likely that report is to be in service now and everybody's probably giggling a little bit because it's absolutely true service now is not the tool we report out of we constantly export our data to the extent of you know 55 percent of the servicenow community has told us that over half their reports are outside of servicenow and they've told us that 74 hours a month are spent doing that taking the data out of servicenow and manipulating outside of servicenow so that i can quote unquote make a report but why are they doing it well they're doing it so they can get better formulas and calculations in excel like the kinds of stuff you get in excel how much value has the service has provided me why don't we just multiply our service test tickets by whatever cost model we're using multiply this column by this value they need slide deck experiences because they typically present to their senior leadership in something like powerpoint or google slides they need better aesthetic control and meaning like i need like vivid charts colors and vivid charts fonts i want my presentations to be about my brand and better distribution because we've all seen reports in servicenow that i can build the report but it's hard to get it in front of the audience and these are the problems that vivid charts has been built to solve and the punch line to my fuller presentation is that you're not looking at powerpoint you're not looking at google slides this is viv you're looking at a vivid chart servicenow implementation and so when i say something like 57 of people say this i'm not i didn't write 57 that is the data on the platform okay so it keeps the data super reliable and if i'll just finish up my kind of like what is vivid charts by going to vividcharts.com dashboards home and these are the kinds of aesthetic and level of control we can put on different reports and i'll wrap this up by saying for those of you who have worked with the cmdb and had to interact with the business on it like you don't go to the to the business and say hey we have like all these duplicates stale and ci it's duplicate stale and orphan cis they'll say so what what's a ci but if you can express it in terms of dollar values right duplicate ci's cost us this stale ci's cost us this orphan ci is costas i de facto have a common language with the with the customer and to get just this out of service now is is a real chore i can't get like multiples i can't multiply one column by one cost in a standard report right it's not easily reached so better formulation better aesthetic control better slide deck experiences and better distribution on the servicenow platform is what vivid charts is all about so i hope i didn't take too much time on that no no that's fine so i have few queries so first thing uh is it based out of service portal itself yeah it's made on servicenow with servicenow components ultimately the visualizations are service portal objects um so i guess i say yes and the best thing that while i was studying vivid chart so one was that loop thing so if you can just show us that i mean that is what uh my clients were looking for the kind of experience that we can give to them and other than that can you tell us about the how to learn i mean vivid charts is a separate app yeah can i make it just a quick suggestion um i can go into this more specifics about vivid charts uh at the end of the main presentation and talk about that as long as you want um but i think everybody came with the idea that they were going to talk about itbms so i want to make sure everybody's satisfied before we proceeded that is that okay yeah i'm totally okay with that yeah cool okay so let's move to itbm related questions so first question that uh i guess 70 or 80 folks have asked that you know we want to start learning itbm so what should be the ideal uh or recommended path that you would trick that yeah to start with it maybe some training manuals or something what would you recommend okay um my first itbm job was a surprise we were i was working for a customer so i was working for a consulting agency we were kind of desperate for work and like a friend of a friend put us in contact with a pmo or implementing itbm they weren't satisfied with their current partner and i talked to them for a while i showed them what i did know about itbm and they said great you're hired and and i wasn't expecting it i was expecting them to say oh you know thanks for the submission but we're going to go with this other expert so i had to learn itbm the hard way um meaning very short interval to train on it um and no real help so i went around begging the experts i knew to give me an hour of time here and our time there and then i spent many many sleepless nights deconstructing this on my own so that i can get to the job and kind of learn on the spot what i wish for you is that you don't have to feel that right especially any of you who are parents like you're talking about staying up super late at night and then waking up tired and your kids want to play with you and you're just like god i just i still gotta learn itbm don't do it my way um the best way if i could do it over again and i had enough runway i would thoroughly completely and without hesitation take the service now paid for course now i don't know the financial impact of like what a course means um in indian monetary value i do know in the us it's not trivial like it's it's a it's an expensive yeah so i do cartoons but the trainings for apm and ppm are currently free on the now learning plan oh shoot man there you go capitalize on that yeah capitalize on that i i like no bones about it servicenow's project management course is a thousand times better than having to deconstruct it on your own there's some things that you just won't get until somebody explains it to you you know what i mean like yeah you know what i mean like sometimes it's just it's going to take me 10 hours to unbundle this and figure out this component or somebody can tell me about it in an hour and the other thing that you'll get is especially in the realm of itbm there's stuff that's there that's fringe case so part of learning part of what will make you good at itbm is quickly learning the things you don't really have to worry about i'll give you a quick example like when you're learning resource management you can request three different types of resources you can request a resource from a group you can request a resource that has a role and you can request a a specific user yeah okay and you go into that thinking oh man in what ways would i use all three and how does all three work and what are the downstream consequences of it who cares 95 of the time people are going to request from group yeah you know what i mean but you never know that going in i didn't know it going in but i sure as hell knew it going out so uh if i had taken the course that hint would have been provided for me so like just to make a long story short if you can like via your employer or via like if you're if you want to be like fully committed i'm going to be an itbm expert you're willing to invest in yourself well shoot i mean the course is free take the course take take the service now course after that sorry after that i can't stress this enough either itbm is one of those things that you kind of constantly need to hone more so than itsm like you can you can almost get away living a life of itsm implementations without ever being like an itil zealot right you can learn it on the fly with itbm i feel like you need constant practice running through different project management scenarios to to get good and stay good at it and i i wish i had more specifics than that but it's a different it's a different skill in terms of acquisition and sustained sharpness than itsm okay so one thing uh so should we go on common i mean once we are done with the training manuals or training stuff so would you recommend going on the community and seeing the questions i mean that's the approach that i follow i mean first i get that training then i went to community see the specific questions maybe the solved ones first then i'll try to solve so it's kind of a practice so would you recommend that i i would i do that in general anyway so like people like ask me hey robert how did you get the way you did and whatever i'm like to 12 years of reading the community every morning right that means i've had thousands of hours that other people haven't and what getting to the community does even if it's for like 10 minutes a day and if you're interested in itbm specifically like go to the community go to the itbm specific subform and read that first page and just click just click and read on the things that are interesting to you right and then you're gonna start finding those areas that i was talking about earlier where it's it's okay to not know or it's controversial to begin with so everybody's going to be confused about it including you right or or the the landmines that you want to avoid because to some extent servicenow isn't mature in one area or another so yes absolutely once you've done the course even before you're done the course reading the front page of the community for any knowledge area is a great way a low friction way to get knowledge [Applause] and are there any blogs or anything that you are following i mean you might be writing some yeah i'm i haven't found many good ones on itvm specifically there are a few people out there that are tremendous brain trusts in this space but they're not they're not content creators um and so if you if you go onto servicenow community and search for uh posts by kelly kaufman yeah she was an early adopter and a and a mega advisor to servicenow about how to do it but she's out of the servicenow space now and um and so a lot of her stuff is early i'm not sure how well it survives the different versions but other than that i wish i wish there was better blogs i'm trying to fill that gap myself and just push more itbm content out but i'll tell you i'll tell you none of that will be useful until you have the base knowledge of either having to learn the hard way like i did and taking the course so the blogs aren't going to give you the the blogs are only going to be golden nuggets after you have achieved a certain amount of knowledge first does that make sense they are not a shortcut they are a reward exactly so um now i will use your experience can you tell us some pointers to keep in mind while we are in the requirement gathering phase for specific to apm or ppm requirement gathering yeah yeah i've been thinking about this a ton and i've been trying to find ways to monetize it myself or figure out a service offering i could do but i'm just going to give you guys a secret okay itbm is different again it's it i wish i had a way to articulate this it's different in how it deploys from itsm to some extent to some extent you could do an itsm rollout on sticky notes right people are used to the concepts got him i'm not articulating this well let me think let me start over okay with my first itbm job which was very successful um i kind of came at it like i i'm not i don't know what it's like to be a project manager my two or three times i've tried to be a pm in my life haven't been successful experiences for me so it's like i don't um i don't understand what their day-to-day is there's very little context so how am i going to build something with you when i know nothing about your experience so what i told my customer is we're all going to build a common understanding of what this does together and i gave my customers like a week-long demo they were interested in ppm resource time tracking demand management ideation um and not so much portfolio and program but not so much the deep financial stuff and so i was like great like pull in two or three of your most opinionated people and we're just going to run through a week-long demo we're just going to do scenario after scenario after scenario and that to me worked a lot better than traditional workshops did because it like it was easy to see where they were comfortable so you didn't have to tread deep on that ground but it also flushed out the problem areas you could visibly see where people were uncomfortable i don't like the way that works because it's different and so that way you could lean into those moments find out these areas which which are going to be i don't battles the wrong word but challenges and then you come out of the week-long demo like here's going to be our challenge areas here's how we're going to solution it train it etc so i'd say for me the key to success to itbm implementations has been front load the training you don't even have to call it training but you just basically call it like product familiarization so everybody knows what they're getting into and they have a common experience language with you the second thing is focus on some focus on scenarios and i use scenarios in itbm because um because let me think there's things that you do in itbm that you don't do in itsm um like a scenario would be how do i create how do i create a demand and then another scenario would be how do i um size and shape a demand and another one would be how do i promote a demand to a project and then another one might be how do i pause a project that's mid-flight and then how do i rebuild my resource requirements when i decide to unpause that project so i break down all the activities that you do in a in a demand in a project etc and i call those scenarios and i spend a lot of time documenting how those work right so that when we go live people have essentially a playbook i'm not sure if you got like in american football they have this thing called a playbook and it's the thing that the coaches share with their players so the players know when i say we're going to run red play number two everybody knows their positions and and and their unique goals so i i take that concept of the playbook and i apply it to itbm so that i catalog all the scenarios write out how they're actually done and again i have that's the map for training i think i get the feeling i was rambling a lot there did that answer the question yeah man that's that's totally what we were looking for so just one quick query uh recently i was implementing ppm so there was we are currently in that scenario of implementing one of my client has asked us to you know use escalators uh that we are having on the store and all those things so what what's your take on using escalators because i feel that uh every using i'm sorry uh that i don't know what we call them escalators that uh have a update kind of thing that is already things have been over accelerators yup oh i heard them yeah i try not to swear i'm gonna try really hard not to swear because this concept deserves every foul expletive in every language on earth combined that's how bad it is um yeah sorry i went there uh i'm not saying that never ever use accelerators ever what i'm saying is there is so much evidence against their use it's the only cases where you would use an accelerator in best practices is rare to non-existent let me tell you what i mean i went through i didn't go through an itbm implementation i had a customer that hired me on as kind of like a call me when you need me architect right and they they were wrapping up a project implementation when i got there and it was it was a train wreck everybody knew it was a train wreck but they were just trying to struggle to the finish line and one of the things that just gobsmacked me was they had deployed the vendor had deployed an accelerator and hadn't even told the customer what was in it and when i went like when i looked at the update set that had the kind of quote-unquote accelerator stuff in it like there was two thousand updates in this thing two thousand items in the update set and i went to the vendor immediately like tell me exactly what you deployed oh uh well i mean it was it's a collection of our best practices like don't specifically what have you deployed or did they provide you any documentation i could they couldn't they gave me they gave me a half hour presentation on generally the stuff that they touched and i've there's been few times where i've been as pissed off as that i can't believe in 2020 after all we've learned about servicenow after all the ecosystem has learned about good software development that we have a situation where somebody can can implement two thousand things that we they don't even know about it's like why are you even bothering with change control and itil and configuration management when you also live in a world where it's somewhat okay to deploy hundreds thousands of lines of code that you don't even know what it does and this is the like let's let's ramp up one level of maturity so let's take this this asinine doofus vendor that deployed this awful update set let's ramp them up one level of maturity and say okay they're not they're not asinine doofus horrible devs they're better than that okay so these people have gone and documented everything that they have in a much smaller update set is that okay well maybe let's say they have a hundred things in that update set and you're nodding your head and say 50 of these things are dead on i totally agree with this what are you going to do with the other 50 are you gonna like in what world does it make sense to deploy stuff that you don't know or agree to just so that you can get to the stuff that you know or agree to it's a ludicrous concept and it doesn't save you any time because sooner or later do you guys have the expression pay the piper we need to rebound in the west we have this fairy tale called the the pied piper and the pie piper comes into a town that's infested with rats and the town says hey pied piper if you play your magic pipe you can take the rats away from our town can you please do that he's like great so he he plays his pipe he takes the rats out of town he comes back he's like where's my money and the town's like ah we don't have rats anymore so we don't need to pay you and so the pit the the pied piper comes back at night plays his pipe takes all the children out of town anyway it's awful it's an awful fairy tale but everybody has to pay the piper and so if you're if you're paying for the stuff that you want with stuff that you don't want that stuff is going to have to be dealt with sooner or later sometime in the future i went really long on that thank you for listening um but yeah accelerators are here's the conditions that i would accept an accelerator number one every single line is documented when i say line i'm talking about update not line of code right but everything that you do in that update set is documented everything the second thing that must happen is that i should be able to turn these things on and off before i deploy the update set if you haven't if you have 100 things and i like 99 of them there is no way in hell i'm going to deploy it with that one extra one you the vendor have to be able to pull that out for me and if you can satisfy those two conditions then maybe i'll deploy that exactly well so what are the possible uh road blockers and the strategy to overcome those so that we have a successful go live yeah we touched on these before uh but it's worth hitting them again i find the first roadblock is a lack of familiarity with servicenow okay when you are when you're talking about itsm people have been dealing with itil on different tools for a long time so there's tons of process familiarity but also a lot of um let me start this over in itsm people are really used to switching tools right it's kind of like before servicenow was like every three years you switch your itsm tool and so people were used to transitioning right servicenow has really extended the time people stay on a tool and that's awesome but everybody was used to it pmos are not you know they've been using like the the two places i was at they had been using microsoft project for i'm not kidding 20 years you can have intelligent conversations with people who are alive you know in that time so um they're not used to switching tools they're very very used to not only their processes but the procedures to execute those processes on the tools that they're on does that make sense um yep like when i want to pause a project and and take the resources and put them on other projects they know mechanically how that happens so you what you're about to pair drop them into another tool where they have no idea how that happens and furthermore it might be a different philosophy on how that's done people get real nervous so the first roadblock is getting as many people familiar with what they're going to before you deploy before you even take requirements because they won't be able to adequately express their requirements within with with too little understanding of what they're going on to right your requirements will be fleshed out with greater familiarity of the end point roadblock one familiarity with the endpoint uh roadblock number two training and documentation um i don't think i make any secret our industry is not good at documentation it like if there's any question about whether or not a scope of work will go the distance or not like people will take training and documentation out to make more time for development yada yada right we've all seen that but in terms of itbm remember when i was talking about the scenarios right you can't just like train these people on tuesday and they come back into work on thursday on a new tool expecting them to take on you know 50 million dollars of in-flight projects having been through classroom training once they need a reference guide so they know hey listen if you're a demand manager and you need to decline a demand or you need you need to make the end point of the demand a story instead of a project here's how you do it so the second um roadblock is the lack of a playbook right we're just as an ecosystem we're not used to building these things um so if you can keep your customers interested in that concept that's that's another great key to success the other two roadblocks i think are the worst is is just the the upfront familiarity and the end state of the continuing training and familiarity program [Applause] okay so if i consider my case okay so i have started uh i have learned ppm apm i have gone through their trainings and everything i have implemented it once i mean one implementation of apm and i guess one and a half of ppm so how can i accelerate my growth in itbm space i mean i am one of those guys that is in the middle that has done the initial phase i have passed that phase so what should i do to you know grow and grow yeah um i would say start building a body of knowledge of your own okay so i you've heard me say scenario scenario scenarios write down those scenarios that you come across in an implementation and just keep them like keep them like your own body of work just so like if you change companies it goes with you instead of stays at the company right um and so the next implementation you go in like the first one you do you deploy resource management you learn the hard way that hey listen nobody requests resources for roles or users or they really shouldn't either so you just say how do i request resources that becomes one of the scenarios that you document and under that header you write your own notes about okay listen like tell people not to use role and user uh resource plans so you're building your own library of things that you've learned and not only does that trigger a different part of your brain and thus stay in your memory longer but you forget this stuff you forget like i went into the you know i went into it my second itbm thing and i was you know i was doing demonstrating something and i was like oh yeah that's why i don't do this part you know i'd forgotten i've forgotten how annoying or this one part was and how i have to reconcile that so for me there's nothing better for personal growth is to keep documenting as you do your implementations and keep practicing what else oh my god and this is the hardest one this is brother really really committed amongst you is to keep doing stuff on your demo data instance like keep building projects keep updating project tasks keep building resource plans um keep building reports keep doing stuff anything to keep that skill set sharp that's a really tall order but it's it's kind of what's kept me in the itbm game and the best way to do that is go on community search for the questions solve them on your pdi and share those screenshots [Applause] yeah that's a good way to do it i find it's just if you could get like every conversation i have with an itbm person every you know i haven't done an itbm gig in a bit but i sell vivid charts into the pmo and so like every insight i get from them i'm just going back to my to my itbm library and putting my own notes in and the best people i know my mentors in this space have got that like got that so fundamental that you know before they even go into a body of services they have a a wide range of questions that they ask uh so they can even save on what i was talking about like doing that week-long demo at the start they've done so many of these and taking such rigorous notes and reviewed those notes afterwards that they've basically got surveys that can act as the better part of a of a workshop um that's that's really great so uh i'm done with my questions okay so we'll start with people popping in so first thing that someone has asked is madhu sudan uh if i'm just pronouncing your name correct so can you just pop in and tell us your question hey there uh hi robert this is mother hi uh i've been i've been on it hey uh i've been on it bm space and i'm uh using it actively developing on it and uh uh for the last six to eight months uh what we are kind of a stable uh at as maturity level what i wanted to know is how can we leverage the success packs the new the now create success packs uh for our day-to-day uh itbm stuff uh just wanted to know is it something we can do or is it just targeted for implementation um i feel like my pants are on my ankles here what's this is a customer success pack is that a piece from the store yes yeah i'll i'll take on that uh so uh success pack uh so for all the participants uh servicenow has recently come up with now create okay so if you want to go on the url list now learning.servicenow.com now create so it has uh various documents let me show you if i have that thing open let me just go back to that open up my browser sorry guys if i got got you off guard i mean if you feel this is not too relevant you can you can hold it for the end oh it's fine i mean that's we have started it let's complete it step girl man so it will take me to the now create so now create is basically uh what servicenow says it's a collection of repositories or documents that you get uh that they have created based on the experience of their say thousand plus implementations so let me just get into it i'm using my personal email to log into that it's not something that is partner specific so here you have a success pack so if you go on here and choose the tool suppose i want to go for itbm so here you will have foundational application this will be updated soon but if you go on this open the success pack you will have documents related to every step of implementation i mean this is a kind of a start that you can have and these documents are good but they are good as long as you are in the starting phase or the pre-sales or the initial documentation phase they will accelerate your expertise your process but and while exporting you can choose the file format that directly to itbm it will create a grant chart or microsoft project or to csv if i export it to csv it will have direct links so this looks like what now success was a few months back yeah no okay great so those what i found with i haven't looked at these ones specifically but what i found for the now success packs was they were awesome i called them the like i called now success like your virtual your virtual kpmg consultant right instead of paying somebody 500 sorry kpmg but instead of paying like a massive high build process consultant you can kind of like look at these documents and fill in your own blanks like oh we're weak here and then capitalize on the lessons learned but it ain't magic right you got to read it you got to ingest it and then see what those lessons would apply like you can't just i think it's just a shortcut to learning the hard way yeah so it's a kind of documentation that developers hate but it's something that is well prepared you just need to use it and modify as per your law okay thanks thanks guys okay so next question that we have is from daniel that uh so guys uh you can also put on your questions in the chat uh i'll just call daniel now so daniel can you just uh give us a go through your through your question just wanted to know good morning rob nice to see you here actually came online very early nice to meet you daniel yeah nice to meet you it's really early in canada here so i had to join really early to be part of this uh session so uh my question is in two parts one do we need to have a good foundation in microsoft project to be really good in itpm that's one and two how do we sell idcbm to show it is really better than a microsoft project to our customers especially the small companies that are not really that big in maturity of your pmo sure okay you always have to make a distinction between adequate good very good and very very good okay so you do not have to be an ms project expert to be good or even very good at deploying itbm successfully that being said every bit of knowledge of ms project gives you more it's a force multiplier for you right because you can meet them where they're at you'll be like hey you remember how difficult it is to quackity quack quack quack in ms project well now in servicenow like you know what i mean you can answer your second question with your first question if you have that ms project familiarity um it's easier to answer the second question now does anybody want to invest in ms project to the extent to have those conversations i don't know like i talk to people who have years decades of ms project experience um so i certainly wasn't an ms project expert but after about two implementations i kind of knew where the i knew where the important conversations were to have now in terms of selling the value of itbm versus ms project i think there's that whole like one platform kind of deal and there's the idea that gosh so i'm not a salesperson so i i hope this does provide some insight for me what excited my customers was having a lot more of the things that make project project in one spot so they were super excited about ridex being like right there on the project they were super excited about many of the interfaces in servicenow that were kind of in more different places when they're using ms project or project web app right i think a lot of what project web app does is put some of the ancillary parts of a project into a sharepoint site so it's not like go to the project see the stuff is like go to the project follow the link add a login now see the stuff so they felt like everything was in more arms reach on service now for my part i think the most exciting bit about servicenow's itbm is the non-project stuff meaning the demand management aspect is killer like pmos think that demand only feeds pmo which is false it's 75 false because there's four outputs to a demand and so demand could be a more robust more open front end to the idea of how do we get work done at this organization and so you can assess every demand using the power of both the pmo and operational teams and you can kind of say like how big is is this bigger than a breadbasket no it isn't okay just put it in the agile hopper okay no it is bigger than a breadbasket we want to manage its scope cost and schedule okay put it into the project hopper and when you're dealing with the companies a long time with ms project it tends to be a lot more rigid than that and they're not as flexible as they think in terms of ingesting demand and getting an output because the pmo will be like they'll spend a week looking at it sometimes even more only to find out this isn't big enough to be a project that could have already been in a sprint you understand what i mean yeah i hope that i kind of want a bunch of different directions there i if i do yeah don't don't give me a very good high school highlights i i really appreciate that cool now i appreciate you coming on to listen thank you thank you daniel so next we have it with koshek so shoot with uh hey hi robert hyderoff so basically i started learning pbm i mean i'm very new to ibm so i started learning ppm through servicenow course which they have on ppm fundamentals i went through it it was a 13 hours and it was very good i got to know the basics of ppm but there were some simulator practices also that i have done but i want to work on some real-time scenarios so how can i you know get the requirements from where i can search like as you were saying like we should write down the scenarios on which we are working on so basically i want to know what could be a real-time scenario for ppm or for apm how how how we can start with that one question yeah you get the you get the prize for the best question um because there's no there's really not a good answer for it but this is really the secret answering this question is the secret sauce to doing anything on servicenow to a master's level somehow you got to find your your way to simulate field scenarios without being in the field um i think what i'll do on this one is maybe start a thread in community about what are some scenarios that you've had to had to address in the field and by address i don't mean develop so you need to you need to hone your skills and not just you know build a solution to a problem uh but also like this is something i'm going to train you this is something i'm going to try and convince you to do with the out of box way that's what i mean by address okay so um there isn't a library where you can go and say here's stuff people have asked for in an itb itb implementation it's hard to assemble that because you'll be like in a workshop and somebody will just be uncomfortable like we do resource management this way which doesn't look at all likes the way servicenow does it so you don't sometimes you don't have the luxury of being able to plan for that in advance it's just being in the field is awesome for that reason exclusively so i would start like i personally will i'm actually going to start a thread in community to get to this level but um but then you can go on the forum of community idm forum and just try out those questions yeah and here's here's another reason why that's particularly hard in itbm because there's there's a lot of different depths some organizations use itbm just for the projects not even the project tasks they do the project tasking in clarity or ms project and they just bring in the parent level project in the service now that's the pro that's like um maturity level zero right then there's people who do projects and project tasks um but maybe just the top level tasks then there's people that put full-on like epic upgrades in healthcare and there's a thousand project tasks in there there's then there's people who use projects and sub-projects then there's people that use projects and resource management then there's people who do projects resource and cost management then there's people that do projects resource cost management integrated with time cards then there's people that roll that up into portfolio you see what i mean so we can like deconstruct five different layers of maturity just here so god i don't know if there is a substitute for being in the field and doing it um but the the thing i would do is start asking people who have been in the field what were some scenarios that you had to deal with i'll give you one example of mine um and servicenow has a solution for it but if you want to practice your dev work in context of service servicenow itbo i had a customer who used a lot of like third-party resources like basically everybody who was working on projects were consultants and the company used one provider and so they basically do this exercise where they reconciled the the provider was saying okay last month we did this many hours the customer would cross-reference that hours with the time card data from servicenow and see if there's any reconciliation that need to get done so what was the what's the op the main need that they needed we needed to figure out how much time was entered for a month now anybody who's looked at time cards will say that sucks because time cards don't be entered by by month time cards are entered for a week you know what i mean so i had to develop a time card days solution um so yeah i kind of go in a whole bunch of different directions there but you're gonna have to just get people who have been in the field ask them for the scenarios that they've had to contend with and i'm going to start a thread in community you can look out for for exactly that purpose okay thank you so much for your answer robert i i would definitely start with community i can uh i can reach out to people who are into management and ask them what are what are their questions or what are their queries which they face while yeah inventing it don't be discouraged man go boldly because this doesn't exist and it's hard okay yeah and uh there was one more thing which i wanted to know like since i don't have much idea about itbm so as we have heard only about apm or ppm so as itbm con contains only apm and ppm or there is more to it which we can yeah a lot more a lot more okay itbm contains like it's it's way more diverse i think than even itsm because you have all those different maturity levels within projects so it's project like just i'll just ride them off like ppm which is project well actually let's think about it this way pm project management then you have programs and portfolios which aren't necessarily big complex projects but they're complex enough then you have cost management budget management two separate things uh you have resource management you have time cards you have um you have the agile stuff stories that's all packaged under itbm um so it's very very wide and i haven't seen like there's just a wide variation of the way people deploy those component pieces of it yeah and apm to apm is in that list okay i guess that answered my question well thank you so much robert thank you so much thank you yeah thank you thank you so next we have is uh the initial presentation of vivid chart which you started looks very impressive if it is possible i would just like to see with a real-time example that for example there is aging report of a ticket on the basis of days we want to pull out from service now using vivid shards so how it would look like well that's the secret sauce isn't it how it looks like is how you is how you set it up to look like and it's that aesthetic control that is what we solve for we don't like it's not necessarily easier for us to make a report with complex conditions or parameters what we provide is greater aesthetic control via a wider array of chart types but also a drag and drop what you see is what you get a static interface for building so i can't just like take a random scenario and show you what the end result is yes you underst right so basically like we the way the way vivid charts finds buyers and value within an organization is we typically look for those reports that an organization is exporting in order to get the aesthetics the slide deck experience the distribution and the formulation that they want okay and then we we build those and the build time could take hours i guess but then by doing so the the data is reliable 100 of the time because it's on service now but also you reduce the need to export it outside the system that's kind of a longish answer but what i'm getting at is again the power isn't our condition builder is better we use servicenow's condition builder the power isn't our filters are better you know our filters are good you know and and comparable to servicenows so the power isn't the complexity of the report that you build the power is the aesthetic control and distribution of the report probably not the answer you're looking for uh if you want to talk about it yeah it doesn't work yeah if you if you want to talk more about it i'm happy to like you know i can schedule someone on one time for sure uh yeah i mean this makes sense to me i was just looking for an answer that what additional value it basically gives over and above the service now reporting module so it is very clear to me it is yeah let's let's okay let me take let's put something in context to the itbm uh question right if anybody's worked with itbm one of the things you'll remember is that the project status report is awesome conceptually but you cannot modify it and you cannot distribute it to people who are not project licensed but what happens in a project is that you have stakeholders all across the organization who will never be itbm licensed but they're very interested in one or two project status reports and so with vivid charts we build them an aesthetically controllable status report and the value is you can distribute that to people who aren't in the pmo and it stops you from having to like we have places where every single week a pm will spend four hours a day exporting all their project data so they can put it into a powerpoint or into something else so that they can distribute to other people so what's the value proposition uh like returning a quarter of an fte right or or however many hours that adds up to that's the value prop your thanks forward thanks for spending great question thank you [Applause] big voice yeah thanks thanks a lot thanks to robert as well as for taking our time having to have such discussion uh i'm actually new to itbrm purely from the itsm background working on different tools uh so it's like i started exploring uh this thing servicenow and i it's like with self-learning i did a certification as well and then but the the servicenow is like well drastically moving uh it's like it's not other tools are not at all to the uh mark of service now so it's like idb are completely new to me it's like as based on these discussions i got to know like it's not just like uh it's just not an extension to the reporting it's just like it's beyond that so so just i wanted to start my learning with that so i just asked that question i think mohit also replied that ppm should be the initial uh step to learn itbl right or is it like you suggest something else no i'd say like ppm is the core like you know what i mean like 95 percent of people who buy itbm are using ppm to some extent yeah okay okay okay so yeah it's an initial step yeah yeah thank you so much ruby still there oh sorry i was speaking on mute so i was saying uh i can't see any more questions in the chat so if you guys have anything just this is the right time you can ask us or if you want you can ask us separately as well but totally your call so anyone get through can you hear me yeah yeah we can hear you yeah hey rue and hey robert uh this was really a nice session and this was my first uh service now i would say meet up outside of my organization so a quick question and probably in line with what akhtar was mentioning right so uh so i started my servicenow platform journey a year back and i totally relate to what robert feels i've been in the industry for almost six years and suddenly i've got a chance to work on servicenow platform and it was a complete eye opener so uh on that note i've been with mostly working on the itsm and a little i dabbled a little on itom and still you know ramping up my skills on the itsm part and i talk about skills as a developer as well as more of an integrator so from oh my question is is it a right or rather is it a logical transition of skills when someone say with your experience works on itsm and item would it be a logical transition that makes you move towards itbm or is the industry making you move towards it and if yes would it make sense for me uh who's a servicenow enthusiast at this point of time really get my skills overall you know developed at a base on on par with ietsm as well i mean when i ramp up my skills should i focus on itm bm and itsm as such or do i start with itsm get really good at it and then focus on itbm i'm sorry if this question was lengthy and if it really doesn't make sense for this particular agenda but that's something i would like to understand it's an excellent question it's probably the most common question i get not with the itbm specificity but a lot of like what do i do how do i grow um it's also one that i'm i might be the worst person in the world to ask this because when i came up it was like your choices are itsm or get out of here right this is the only thing that pro the the platform did itsm and custom apps so i watched it grow wider now do i suggest you pick a random resource who wants to excel in servicenow do i suggest to do itself on itvm absolutely positively not okay i would suggest that you get as much of an understanding of itsm as you're interested in because let's just be honest here itsm has been servicenow's bread and butter for almost two decades right so almost every customer in the universe has servicenow itsm engaged so if you're if you're in your early part of your journey and you want to maximize your ability to get any kind of work itsm is let's call it your safety net okay now you want to excel you want to be a player in a certain space now you've got to figure out what the niche you're interested in it doesn't have to be itbm okay i certainly didn't plan on itbm being one of my niches and if you caught me before the jobs i did on it i'd have been like that's not me right like i'm terrible at project i don't understand that it was only a couple brilliant field experiences that put me there so if you're interested in itbm if you kind of like get off on it if you like working with that um then lean in that direction the platform is way way wider than ever right so if it maybe hr floats your vote maybe customer success management floats your boat maybe you're deeper in the technical stuff and you like getting like dealing with integrations and orchestration um virtual agents there are process areas and technologies that you can niche down on and there's there's more than enough you can like swing a dead cat just pick one um it you i so the answer is no i don't suggest itsm and igbm unless you're interested in itvm thank you robert that that gives a lot of clarity to me and thank you for your perspective thank you so much no problem that one is that's important right for because you guys you can't do it like i did it you must not do it like i did it you don't have the time so if you want to have further discussions about that and this goes for anybody here further discussions on what should i do next where do i fit do not hesitate to reach out i'm more than happy to have that deeper level conversation with anybody here thank you robin so questions just to add on that it's just a platform is quite wide you just need to find which area suits you most which area excites you and most importantly which has the opportunities once you figure out that you just need the zeal to learn rest will fall in place it's just that you need to see what you want best you can do yeah i think from this meet i got that clear picture in my head because i come from uh not to drag it further just a quick brief i come from a little uh monitoring tools kind of uh and dabbled a little bit on idsm prior to my service now exposure so i think it'll item has been a good fit for me so maybe i'll focus on that but yeah i think i got that clarity with this call thank you so much guys yeah you're welcome man you're welcome so let's take the another question from madhu madhusudan so first thing uh madhu thanks for answering in the chat it's really great you're helping folks out so now hey i do i don't know whether we are running out of time i just i just don't want to take more than a dollar time is it okay to with my question yeah yeah sure okay uh hey robert i mean uh i as i mentioned i'm just uh currently performing a scrum master role in the servicenow development on other uh platforms and also i t bm so as an individual and all the folks uh in in recall what would be my growth journey in itbm space i'm again my limited exposure to servicenow if if i become interested and want to pursue further levels of itbm exposure uh what do you see as a persona for for for a person to grow okay so you're a you're a scrum master now did i hear that right yes scrum master for the servicenow development team yep oh okay so you're you're in charge of making sure that the sprints get on point for the work that's being done on the servicenow platform right that is correct yeah i mean there's a couple different ways so if you if you if you enjoy that work if you enjoy the management of the like getting the stuff done okay um then you you know there's odd the obvious choice is just going farther off that dial stack right being a product owner or what have you taking on a wider scope of applications and just being like the best scrum master slash product owner that you can be but like if you want a service now specific answer then you kind of have to realize that it's changing jobs right it's fundamentally changing that which you do and so i guess i would like if i was in your shoes and i wanted to get more into servicenow implementations uh or have a more consultative presence or a more kind of like community amplified presence about who am i what do i do i would probably leverage this is me being you right i would leverage my scrum master experience because you have a like there's a question earlier what scenarios do i deal with you deal with all the scenarios for scrum masters don't you so you understand that yeah right so you could what i would do is go get somebody to take you deep on how the safe framework works in servicenow as well as the kind of like the release sprint story that whole paradigm get them to take you as deep as they can and you will form a matrix of like where servicenow's mechanics align and does not align with your experience as a scrum master like i really love these parts right and so you have a special place where you can reconcile the parts that you know scrum master will hate and you can either provide solutions or consultation to make that smoother this is an excellent advice yeah i mean yeah thank you thank you on the other hand i i'm i'm also a dev so it's like i'm playing the dual role of a dev and also a scrum masters so i do regular development on itbm on the grc and some of itsm so so keeping my hands dirty too but again keeping at the process level too so uh that was a very good uh that was inside uh robert i i really appreciate that yeah you are awesome so thanks so daniel has asked us requested us for one more question so daniel it's all up yeah i have one more question please uh i think this question is for both of you drove and uh robots i would like to from your perspective overall what value do you see getting and maintaining servicenow certifications considering the fact of how expensive it is to get them and maintain them especially with the new rules and regulations that has just come out and if we're gonna focus if you're gonna look at like a crystal ball which niche areas do you think newcomers like us can focus on that will be beneficial to us at least we can get jobs we can flourish a little bit because it seems everybody is coming into service now at this point in time i got answers for both of those there's two questions right number one the what's my take on the value of the certifications is that i adequately repeat that or yeah the but as in is it something we can how can we do without it something yeah okay can we do without it no i would say no you you can't do with that well shoot there's there's a bunch of different answers for this i'll try and like not take up a half an hour just answering this okay but if you if you anticipate being in a consultative job in the servicenow ecosystem get the cert if you work for somebody as servicenow's like if you're like i work for a company not a consultative one like i work for southwest airlines or cargill or something like that as their servicenow person then you don't need to start because you're already there and you just do what you need to do right now if you work for a company like that exploit the education programs available to you talk to your hr department and get the certs certs don't hurt okay but there is a second like the search only benefit you okay but there's a second element of that that was purely financial because the more certs i have the more reconciliations i have to do more cert maintenance so i i don't believe that more certs on service now is always better okay and that goes back to the question i just finished answering is where do you want to work like i know for a fact i will probably never i will probably never go after the age because i just don't like i don't work there enough that's not where you know none of those fish bite my bait why should i upgrade my bait um so what i go after like i personally i go after the itbm sir i go after the pa cert because those are areas i enjoy and if i ever just went purely consultative or if i wanted to subcontract people are probably going to ask me about like where's your cert now daniel like i i've been on your linkedin profile time you have a lot of searches right you kind of like a certain collector just be really like just be really cutthroat about what you actually want to do what you actually want to do and don't don't assume that like you have to you have to go wide to maximize your attractiveness to a employer or somebody's going to hire you on contract like there's like you don't necessarily have to go after every type of work go after the work that you're good at and passionate about and certify there don't certify all over the place so that's question one question two what like crystal ball which ones do i think have the most oomph behind them uh and at this point i'd say again does not matter there's too many of them to worry about right it's it's really a matter of and plus i see different things than you guys see and that's not necessarily a good thing for me like you guys might have better intel than i do about what's actually going on out there out there in the world like i you know i i run vivid charts all day long right i'm not in the field with a ton of clients i'm in a i have a very narrow like i talked to five or six new client customers a week about what they're doing regardless of the reporting y'all are the ones that are out in the field right you're also the ones in your own company seeing what's up so trust your own instincts there don't necessarily like rely on my crystal and then keep your mind open understand that there are technical avenues and process avenues to to niche down in okay yeah just to add on uh considering the job market okay so at least you should have admin one it was free uh recently i hope that campaign will come again second thing uh just focus uh if you are working as robert mentioned if you are working for a consultant company like cognizant deloitte teachers just exploit their uh program because servicenow is offers some good discounts to partners and in my i can tell you about my organization constant trainings are going on so just take i'm just taking advantage of them important is uh the skill that you have right i mean resume the certificate will help you just shortlist your resume okay but it at the end of the day it's your skill uh that matters yeah but the other thing too i would i would encourage is and this is this is a meta lesson okay take take what i'm telling you about this specific question and apply it to everything you do in service now okay this is secret sauce why why do you look at certs in a cost paradigm and not a value paradigm right so on the surface you look at here's the like and i have this problem myself right on the surface i had why should i pay essentially four thousand dollars to take the two performance analytics courses so i can get certified four thousand dollars is a decent amount of money you could buy like you could buy half a car for that right so it you look at it like that lost four thousand dollars but i was sitting there with a 50 000 opportunity that required me to have the cert so it's it's you know to some extent it's nature like this is the way nature works sometimes you have to pay for the opportunity to play it's cutthroat right you got to be wise in terms of which of the which of the ones you pick like which work you want to go after but you can't think of it in terms of of cost only you have to consider value and if you look at something all you can see is cost maybe that's not the one you want to go after right so now everybody else who's been listening on that take that lesson and apply it everywhere else on servicenow when you're in front of your customers what like internal or external right people are always asking you for stuff and or or you're having good ideas and it's up to you to convince them to spend their energy and resources on this thing you're proposing right so they're going to think in terms of cost get them to think in terms of value that's your secret sauce one for today that's great man so just one more thing to add on the things that servicenow is changing so uh certification map stuff is changing a lot so we have to wait for paris release certainly there is one maintenance cost per year maintenance cost for the all the searches not for one that is not per certificate waste that is for all the search the deltas we give and as far i know servicenow is planning to bring on most of their trainings uh as on demand like currently they have ppm on demand they're planning for csm by december i guess this december 2020. so just have a check on that as well i mean it's all up to you it's all upon the demand in the market it's the value base as robert mentioned okay okay so i guess we don't have any more questions so i'll just wrap up with the last slide okay so after this i would be sharing one feedback link and the link for this recorded session and if you have any queries just email on that and please do fill that feedback form because it will help us to improve as well as uh to decide the next topic okay so my preference uh would be on vs code but let's see what we get from the audience okay guys thanks so much for all the awesome questions and drove again i'm really honored that you picked me to do this and uh you know hope you guys have a great sunday night and a great start to next week robert it was my pleasure to have you here and frankly speaking when i think of itbm i saw the feedback on the first uh session that people wants to learn about itbm get stuffs rolling so the first name that come to my mind was yours and it was really great that you just said yes like i was not expecting that to come that easy but yeah thank you very much for you know enlightening enlighten us with your thoughts and with your experience i can my perfect guys have good night good night guys have a great day and thank you keep looking out for the space for more info the feedback form thank you very much bye you