Infusing design into your ServiceNow teams

All right, we're gonna get started. The next thing. This is us. Safe harbor. I think we've all seen this before, this is kinda standard boilerplate. We're not gonna be talking about a lot of things that, probably have anything to do with this. So, it's here. You can read it. Read it at another one. (Jason laughs) All right, we're gonna get started. - My name's Josh Levie. I work for Accenture Federal Services. You good? Okay. - Okay. I've been doing web design development since I was 12. So for a long time now. I started my career at working for some trade associations. Then digital agencies. Now federal contractor for Accenture Global. Turn it over to Jason. - My name's Jason Kobs. I've been working in the design space for a long time. I worked at a product company. I've worked at agencies. I worked at a community startup, which is really fun. And now Josh and I work together at a global consultancy. So, we get the pleasure of running a 40 person design team that's comprised of designers and front-end developers. And, not only do we do that but we're also working on innovating with components and component-led delivery. And that also, kind of, brings up the innovation lead positions that we both run across multiple platforms. Come on. Work with me now. All right. And as part of our job, we have daily conversations. We talk with leaders, our client leaders, we talk with project leaders, inside of our company. We're talking about the value of design. I know that design's been around for a long time. We still talk about the value of design, every day. We talk about how our methods bring that design to their project teams and enable change. One of my favorite questions I get asked all the time is, "When should we bring a designer onto the project?" My answer is always, yesterday. - Yep. And so we get to talk about sales. We actually talk a lot with our teams from UX/UI, BAs, developers. We talk a lot about career growth. And that's kind of fed into our design philosophy and our methodologies, to make sure that everybody really is growing and they're learning all the time. See if I can get it to work, here we go. And so for today's conversation, if you're interested in any of these topics, from branding, to, sometimes we're an army of one, I know, I've played that role many times. This is gonna help you. This is gonna be, you know, kind of, applicable to any of these style of projects. And sometimes it's 200 plus people, sometimes it's a army of one. All right, so, I didn't say this but this is an interactive presentation. Quick raise of hands, how many people here will call themselves designers? Okay, so like, okay. Now, keep those hands up. How many people here work with designers? Okay, a lot more, that's great. So, just to kinda give a level set and have some context, I like to start off this. I think a lot of us understand what design doing is. We can look around at this conference, we see our badges, we see really cool things every day. And that's, kind of, the result of a lot of design doing. We don't often see the design thinking that happens behind that. And there's a lot of, you know, macro ideas and strategies and visions that come with that. So this is, just kinda help level set. When we're talking design, we're talking much more than design doing. We're talking about design thinking and strategy and all that other pieces. I know, AJ, you know, when does design really get started? - So, who can participate in design thinking? Everyone. You don't have to be a designer. You don't have to be an artist. There's human-centered design. I'll actually be talking about it later today, at 14:15, this same location. But when we think about design, it is not always just making things look pretty. It is thinking about the text and the questions that you ask on a standard form. Simple, just, text issues can cause users to stumble. How is the information being chunked out? Do you want 25 questions on a page or do you want five pages of five questions? Often the latter. Because you don't wanna overwhelm the users. Jason. - Yeah, so I think, it's just an easy way that everybody can get started. You don't need a design degree. You don't need a design pedigree, like Josh and I have. You can get started right away. And I think, if you take that and we're gonna talk a little bit more about it. But I think there's many things that people can do. You don't need the title of a designer to do that. So, if we think about, in a context of the projects that Josh and I get to work on, there's tons of ambiguity. When a project starts, we have a lotta hopes and dreams. We have a lotta feelings. I don't know if any of you guys know exactly what MVP is gonna be when you start. You know, you figure that out along the way. And so, the chaos that is the start of a project, often needs to be figured out. And we're not necessarily gonna dive right into Agile to do that. We need to start doing some design processes and design thinking to make that happen. So, here on the left side, there's tons of activities that we actually do throughout the whole life cycle of a project. But in the beginning of a project, you see on the top left here, there's surveys, there's research, there's personas and action map and facilitating workshops. All those are design activities that can be done. And many of the times can be done by multiple people, other than just design professionals. And then, as we start to define a lot of that and set the vision, then we get into a lot of the design doing activities. And then, you'll see that there's wire frames and there's prototypes and there's user interviews and email designs and activation materials. All those things are probably more of the design doing things, that we're used to seeing and we think about when we think of design. And hopefully, if we do all this right, we're actually gonna be able to drive to really detailed user stories that build a wonderful backlog, that we can then go work. So this is kind of the framework. When you think about design, this is the design lifecycle throughout a whole project. It's there the whole time. Do you wanna go? - Go ahead. So, when I think of including design in our teams, it kind of shows up in three ways. You may have different ways you would call it, these are the labels that I use. styles in these three. These are generally the three buckets that I consider, when we're putting design into project teams. So to get started. I call this a standard scrum. And this is a scrum team that has no designers. I kept my handy, you know, left side here but you can see that there are some highlighted activities that we can do without a design professional. We can do surveys. We can actually think about user roles and use cases. These are valuable things that your team probably needs to do to make sure that you're driving the solution, to solve real problems for people. In this case, yeah, we don't have time for design, really. We don't have a lot of the design tools. But you can use something like a whiteboard or a mural or something like that, to actually do some of this stuff. You don't need specialty tools. - And we have our favorite tools right here, that we'll be talking about later at the next session. Post-its and stickies. - And Sharpies. Yeah. - That's really all you need to get started. - I think the big thing now, is, with this you can still build a backlog. And even if you don't have designers there, day one, you can start building a backlog, that you can then bring more people in or at least use to help validate bringing design resources into the project at some point. Like we said, they can be there from the beginning and that's what we prefer but if you have a backlog, then you can actually help justify, we need more resources to do this. So the next one is, what I call, Full Scrum. And this is where, you can see, we have a designer in the scrum team now. And now we have many more things lit up here on this left side, that we could start doing. And a lot of that's enabled because now we have design tools. Designers come with really cool design tools. And they also, the project has dedicated time to that designer to be there. So now we can facilitate user interviews. We can actually, you know, kind of work on journeys, maybe not full journey maps but maybe some micro journeys. We could do storyboards and style guides and wire frames and prototypes and many of those other things, that enable us to really fine-tune and hone in on, you know, defining the requirements and making sure that they land for the users. - And I'll add, that sometimes we get questions around our actual staffing makeup. And we'll hear a project has three or four business analysts on it. And then the developers and the project leads. Our motto is, let's maybe take one or two of those business analysts off and replace them with a designer. Because they're often gonna do some of the duplicative work. But then just as Jason mentioned, they're gonna bring all this additional capabilities to the project. - Yeah. Because they're bringing new tools. They're bringing, you know, new methods that, say a standard, you know, analyst might not have. So I call this, the Supported Scrum. Because we don't have designers necessarily embedded in the scrum team but you can see, we have the full gamut of things that we could possibly do. Everything's lit up because we have a much bigger design budget. And this is generally a professional agency or an agency inside a company that has multiple design roles in it, from a creative director, art directors, designers, IXDs, all the roles can be represented. And then we can have everything that we need. You'll see, just through this illustration, one of the things that may come up, is you may actually be struggling to facilitate communication between these teams. The scrum team's gonna scrum and the design team's gonna design. Their goal is to not educate the other ones. So, that's one thing to watch out, if you have a team like this, you really wanna foster communication between designers and the scrum teams. Or if you have multiple scrum teams working on a feature, you're gonna see, maybe a little bit more disconnected teams. - And to make sure that you could run into, you have a waterfall actions happening over here and you have Agile happening over here. So how do you really bridge those together? And I'll let Jason bring that up next. - Yep, so, actually, this comes to our next interactive portion. A quick poll, I'm gonna run through these. As far as the types of scenarios you guys are working with, hands up if you're working with a standard scrum, no designer involved. Now, the second one, is a designer, kind of, embedded in a scrum team? Is anybody rolling with that? Okay, great. And then, does anybody have that supported scrum, where there's, kind of, a bigger agency of designers or a whole design crew? Not a lot of that one. So, Josh and I's preferred method, our go-to method, is the full scrum team. We modified a little bit and we added design lead in. And that's a small percentage time but they can support the whole team. And we actually get a few more things lit up on the sidebar here. - I think for us, internally, one of our colleagues in the back, actually coined it, they call it the Josh and Jason tax. And we say it's about 10% of whatever the project's scope is, to ensure that we have some oversight and an overview over the designers, give them design guidance and make sure that everything's running smoothly. And also, that we know the platform and help educate them on the platform even further. - And then, I think, another thing that we add too is, for our teams, we really make sure they get certified. So not only do, you know, we think about, from a business analyst or a developer, there's a lot of certifications. We actually try and put our designers through all those certifications as well. I wouldn't necessarily say they're, you know, it's not that they're exempt, it's that they're finding ways to bond with their team. They understand what the project lifecycle is. And they can actually bring design to the whole team and teach the whole scrum team about design processes. - And even last week I had a conversation with one of our designers and she's looking at doing the certified application developer certification but she's like, "I don't know a lot of JavaScript, is that gonna be a problem?" And, no, you should still, you know, maybe you need to take a little refresher on that but understanding the platform and understanding the technology, only creates a better product in the end, for the users and the user experience. So, now people have said, great, we have designers in the team but they just don't seem to be working that well with our team. How do we get them to work better, in this technology? So, this moves us to our next few slides. And this is probably, you know, every team has a different flavor but this is general guidance that we give our teams and we give you. So, when we think about a platform designer, this could be a UI/UX designer, could be a UX, BA, there's several different flavors that sometimes will run. When I think about a creative, they're naturally creative, they're naturally trying to find cool new ways of doing things. The thing that they may not be doing a lot, is thinking about time. So I really wanna, you know, let them do the creative and coach them on creative but really emphasize the time limits that they have, the constraints of the platform and really get them to deliver design. I don't give anybody points for designing cool stuff that never gets into production. So I think that's a huge leap for designers. And for some of them, it's really hard for them to understand where the value actually is. 'Cause they're so used to thinking about cool, creative but, they don't know. They don't know, you know, what feature is actually gonna drive real value for our customers. 'Cause they're not necessarily business-orientated folks. So, that's one thing that we, kind of, we think about a lot. And, you can see, yeah, an emphasis on time, not necessarily the tools, we do a little coaching on tools but it's a lot on time. Because that's what the rest of the team is driven on, time and hopefully we're all using Agile. And time is a huge part of that. And so, conversely, when we think of platform developers, they're very time conscious. They're generally running off of two week sprints. And they're thinking about mitigating risk, to get their tickets done. So, what we'd really love them to do is, to be involved in the creative process and turn that creative part of their brain on. And I know that many people, like, think designers are the creative ones. I don't think so. I think Josh and I, like, the way that we run the team, it's not so, we're trying to have the designers go and turn the creative lights on for everybody else. And so, everybody on your team has creativity, they all have thoughts about how to do something. So this is for developers but I think BAs, this could apply to them, just as easily. So, how do we get them to be more creative? We have to free up their time a little bit. It's hard to do when you're in full Agile sprints. when you may not bring a developer in because we're doing vision and ideation, we bring those developers in right away, so that they can coordinate with us, they can understand the use cases as they're coming in. And they can start creating spike sprints, for them to start thinking creatively. They're gonna say, wow, I have a lot of list views I gotta make. Like, okay, how do I create the right list? Do I need to create something, you know, different? Do I need to think differently about how we do this? And now I can go and, from a leader or from a developer, we can go and direct some of their work, to go figure out how to do those complexities that we have to solve for. - Along those lines, we work with Service Portal a lot but there's also UI Builder coming up. And in terms of the actual execution of the design, again, going back to, design is not just making it look pretty but it's also, how is the form order going? What are the questions that we're using for all users? Jason hears me say this all the time, every user is a user, whether you're in a Service Portal or you're in Workspace or you're in admin, in the platform itself. And so we've also found that for our developers and our platform front-end developers, is, having them have a background in HTML, CSS, Angular and then training them on the platform too. I'm looking at a handful of mine in the background, who are smiling as, that's exactly what we've done and we've been extremely successful with that model. And so the last one's probably a little bit of a sleeper. There's a lot of leadership around this conference today. One of the things that comes up a lot is, you know, when things fail, we go back to what we did before. And so, that might be micromanaging, that might be, you know, kinda, jumping in and trying to take everything on yourself. One of the things I often tell project leaders is, we need to encourage the communication between the team and let the designers, developers, let everybody do what they're there to do. Like they're gonna bring their whole self to work. The issue is, oftentimes more than not, is that they don't know where the value for our client actually is. And that happens, if you think, like, if we're bringing developers in later, well they weren't in those initial conversations, they didn't listen to the actual user interviews. So if we bring them in, in the beginning, they should have a better context. But if they're lost or they're not communicating as well as we'd want them to, as a leader, help them refocus on what the value is and then encourage them to keep communicating. And then, we've found that the project team helps figure it out and we don't have to do all the micromanagement that everybody hates and we don't wanna do anyway. So in closing. I think about these three things all the time. Do we have the right processes? Are we using human-centered design methods? We have some additional methods that we've developed for doing platform design. Like, are we bringing that to our projects? Do our project teams know how to do that. And that does not necessarily mean, once again, that you need a designer in every project team. But, if we bring the processes, generally that facilitation and good outcomes happen. And we talked a lot today about the people that are on those teams. So that's bringing designers in but also helping other folks on the team understand the design process and what the value in that is. It's not just a add-on, it's kind of how we do things. We hear a lot about AI from the core, it's not just a bulk add-on. Design is from the beginning, it's not just an add-on. And then, we think about the product, we've got a great product to work on. And we also are thinking about ways to innovate how we deliver that product. And that could be with additional drag and drop widgets, that could be in other accelerators that we're building and bringing SMEs into the process, so that. - And I'll add to that too, that ServiceNow and the customer experience, SIG is also creating a lot of Figma templates for designers, to start working using Figma, which is one of the most popular design tools. So there is a large initiative, even from ServiceNow as a platform, to improve the user experience, with Nix experience, provide those tools, provide that support. We have a lot of their experts. I've been working on ServiceNow since Eureka. We're now coming up on Washington, D.C. So for a long time. - So, I don't know if you guys can hear me on this one. Even in the app today, there's four design discussions left today. Josh is gonna be doing one at like, 14:15, we called out. But there's 11 more tomorrow, there's four on Thursday. There's some good representation here at the conference. So you can, you know, continue the thought process around how, you know, like, design, how you're gonna implement it. And there's a lot of hours of training around design activities, facilitation, you know, on learning. So, there's plenty of ways to continue to get started. There's other sessions, they're gonna have even more resources, if you wanna go to those and dig in deeper. So with that, we have a few minutes left for questions, if you guys wanna ask any. If you would rather just reach out and come stop Josh and I on the floor, we're happy to do that too.