the devies is our annual app of the Year award created to recognize outstanding achievements by the service now practitioners who build new apps on our platform in this episode we'll be talking to our 2024 deie app of the Year winners about their experience welcome to breakpoint the service now developer [Music] podcast hello service now Edmonds Builders developers and curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and trade craft to accelerate your career my name is CH tamasi and I am a senior developer Advocate and I am joined by another senior developer advocate of course that would be Lauren McManaman how are you today Lauren I am doing fantastic Chuck how about yourself off to a good start it's Monday morning as we record this so beginning of a new week new set of opportunities these and looking forward to getting well I've got a lot of podcasting stuff going on this week and this includes this one and in this episode we have the pleasure of talking to get these titles they're like ours Enterprise application architect at Veterans United Josh Barber how are you today Josh well Chuck thank you awesome great to have you here and we have the production project manager at Veterans United Christina vincon how are you Tina I'm doing great all right I may I call you Tina Christina okay Tina's I saw that in an email and I thought I'd run with it because you signed it that way and if anybody called me Charles during a whole podcast I'd think I was being interrogated by the police well welcome to breakpoint before we begin I always like to get to know our guests so let's start with you Josh tell us a little bit about yourself my name is Jos Barber and I've worked in it support um for about the last 20 years I spent 14 working for a bank where I managed a service desk and also some technical projects and um I started in service now about 9 years ago and I've been a Veterans United Home Loan since 2019 as a full-time admin and developer and now an architect and Tina what's your intro I'm Christina Vincent I am currently a production project manager at Veterans United home loans I've been at V for almost 14 years um prior to working at V uh this is my only second job since college so I worked at craft Foods um so I stock shelves and I uh started here at 2010 uh working in the call center so I took applications um I processed loans for a little bit I was an administrative assistant for a few years and but primarily been a project manager for the last nine years um working in service now now uh in 2021 that was my first big technical project prior to that I I mostly worked with the operations department on workflows and system updates and new products and things like that so working in service now that was my first experience in 2021 so you know this front to back going all the way from front first going all the way back to the call center and through operations pretty qualified when it came to hey we need to fix this yes absolutely so when we established our um values in 2009 I read that there were only 200 employees back then and today we have 4,200 employees so the idea was sparked back in 2020 with our production leadership um in my now team lead Andy McCarthy he actually started the project so he did the initial Vision the problem statement and things like that and and got that um organized and I think it was July of 2021 and I was brought on from compliance in in 2021 and we quickly realized like we have over 300 different types of requests that a loan officer could ask from initial application to close we had 60 plus email dros that they had to remember we didn't have it stored anywhere wait wait wait jumping your head oh sorry sorry I know you're excited there's that passionate part I love my product let's Circle a little bit backwards just a little bit before we move on to the product itself one story that we like to get out of our guests as well is tell us a story of a Time You' thought you did something that you thought you might get fired for usually this comes as like an innocent mistake is an intern or doing like on Productions so T I'll stay with you do you happen to have any stories like that yeah um so when I was an operations admin um I was working on some incentive stuff so like we we were ranking employees and so I was helping organize that for operations managers um and I accidentally added somebody on the floor that was a part of that incentive um so I immediately realized my mistake ran out to the floor and said please delete this um so we got it deleted out of her Outlook and I trusted her so I she wasn't the type of person that would share that information anyway but I definitely thought I was going to get in trouble for sharing that type of information yeah the dangerous BCC or dangerous CC of it'll get you every time we had this company have two people with the same name I think or there's there's three groups of people with the exact same name so yeah we are not strangers to that Josh do you happen to have a a humbling story as well I do yeah when I was working for the bank um I assisted a user in taking down the main frame oh so the main frame runs all the back-end banking operations for the bank and um it had already gone down two times that day when I was talking to the user they said oh I'm the one taking down the main frame i' better let somebody know and I said that's impossible you couldn't be doing that and so he tried it again and the main frame went down again so as it turns out it was a query he was running so it wasn't really our fault but I did kind of learn a lesson that day and I didn't get fired but um I was a little ashamed to tell the story afterward hey what's one more if it's already gone down twice what's one more you know it's just it's just right that's right there you go we may have a security issue or something are these are these people supposed to have this access right and also now that we've gotten The Humbling out of the way tell us something that you like to do outside of work as well do you have any hobbies or any fun interest outside of service now yeah so I am a mother and a wife so I've been married for the last 10 years to my husband Tim uh he's a baseball coach Elementary School teacher firefighter bus driver so he wears all the hats in our family um I have two kids a 7-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son so they're in elementary school so we're really busy with baseball and softball and we like to go on little little vacations little adventures together and and spend most of our time with our family sounds lovely sounds great sounds like he's also a very busy man too lots lots of hat and Josh yeah I enjoy spending time Outdoors um like sports like uh just hiking and getting out and enjoying nature running and I also love to spend time with my kids um I've got three kids and and they are all involved in sports year round so I get to help coach some of their teams and enjoy going to all their games we're right in the heart of baseball season right now so we are very busy man two very active Healthy Families love to hear that's great Josh you mentioned Veterans United can you tell me a little bit more about that absolutely Veterans United Home Loans was established in 2002 by owners Brock and brand Bukowski uh we're an interet internet-based company out of Columbia Missouri with over 20 branches across the US uh we are the number one VA purchase lender in the country and uh we established our values back in 2009 which is a very big part of what we do and uh something that we all believe in and buy into very heavily so uh we we believe we should be passionate and have fun uh deliver results with Integrity enhance lives every day I like that be passionate and have fun I think every job should have that value in there somewhere absolutely we take it very seriously now circling back now we teased a little bit about the project already but let's go back kind of to its origin Point what is the was the inspiration originally for building this application or like what problem was the one trying to be solved yeah so back in 2009 we had 200 employees so that's when we established our values and today we have over 4,200 employees across all of our companies um and in 2020 that's when this initiative was sparked um my now team lead Andy McCarthy he um started the project so he created the initial vision and the problem statement worked with our production leaders on um identifying like what are our different types of requests that could be asked throughout the entire project and who are a subject matter EXP experts and things like that so I was brought on in 2021 and I collected over 300 different types of requests that a loan officer could ask from initial application to close um and we had over 60 plus distribution emails that people just had to remember we didn't have it saved anywhere and if you've been here for a while you you know specific names so people were reaching out to like Melissa or jilyn or Jared and they and that's not necessarily their job and so it's taking up a lot of their time because we're very helpful people we don't like to say no um and so we really needed to centralize our work um because in 2020 I think we hired over a thousand people when interest rates went so low so it wasn't sustainable in the system that we were working in um so the vision was to create like a Consolidated platform where people could search for articles and either self-resolve or they could um easily get help which is where production support comes in all right so you you've got all of this tribal knowledge you've got these distribution lists people are not really they they don't have any system what did you build to address this problem so through all that collection of information we created um I think over 90 catalog items um we Consolidated all of those support emails 60 down to the top like 28 I think we're closer to 30 now because we're ever growing so this is a never ending project um and then all of our email notifications and things like that so this is all Consolidated in our landing page that we call production Central so production Central um is the One-Stop shop for loan officers to do their job so it consists of over 2,000 knowledge based articles it consists of all of our catalog items so you can easily search for what you're needing help with you don't have to remember to go to Jared to go to jilyn or to go to one of the 60 email addresses um so just you have to Define what you're looking for and fill out simple form and get help with the right group the first time I know we kind of also wax poetic about all the like actual achievements of this project but I'd love to hear them from your own words as well what were the outcomes of creating this kind of repertoire of catalog items and the application behind it so in 2022 when we had the full um years's worth of data we had 95,000 requests in 2023 comparing we had 234,000 requests and we're on target for 330,000 requests so we are wow blowing up this system um and uh we did send a survey out to our production floor just to make sure like are we satisfying your needs so this was early on I think we sent this in 2020 and we did have a 90% uh positive rate rating so we took that and we met with all the production leaders we wanted to Target that 10% Like how can we make this better for you is it a knowledge Gap uh do we need better resources and things like that so with us being new to working with service now and having a 90% positive rating I I took that as a huge win I'm very proud of that um we were able to make processes more efficient with some of our production support teams so like one team that's in my department they double their work from like 20,000 to 40,000 requests year over year and they save time so they saved I think 20 minutes um per request with the same amount of users so we're they're identifying um subject matter experts within their own team so they're more efficient they're coming up with their own processes um and streamlining things just so that they can get the answers out there quicker um another thing too is like with service now any new initiative and we're coming up with initiatives every single day we can quickly turn around and like create a new catalog item and instantly have that data so we can share with our Executives like this is the volume and this is the turn times and like we need uh training materials or we need um new uh production support articles um things like that so we are bringing service now and our production support teams along with us in every project that we do Josh I want to throw this one in your direction what challenges did you encounter on this project from a technical standpoint um we were trying to architect a product that we weren't quite sure how it was going to be used um for example do we have a single ticket that goes across or a single table that goes across all of these these different groups these different support groups do we have multiple tables and to tell the truth we actually started down a path and I believe we were about two to three months into the project and our technical team sat down and said okay are we really utilizing service now in its most efficient manner and we decided to re-engineer the entire process so with with approval from the production side of course um we went back and within about a week or week and a half we redid several months worth of work and got it back to what we figur what we thought was going to be a more efficient manner for the future so um trying to work with a extremely intelligent production team who knows the production process in and out but to communicate these Tech these highly technical Concepts um was definitely a struggle um we're very fortunate to have some folks who are very patient and understanding and um we're willing to have these conversations to understand what it was we were doing to help them so that definitely helped us get to the final product much easier so did you opt for the single table or the multi-table we actually have it all running on a single table um and the reasons why we have between all these groups they like to transfer tickets back and forth or requests back and forth and so it it makes the the transfer much easier um from one group to another so if a ticket does land in the incorrect location um they know who contact and they can quickly get that moved over and um we even built it in so that they could transfer to our technical help desk if a ticket lands in the wrong place they can nice transfer it that way as well so that's been a big benefit to us from both sides of the house did you consider an extended table architecture such as you know task and you know because the task table by itself is built for tasks you have assignment groups and I'm asking this completely out of the blue so if you don't have an answer I'll be sure to edit that part out but I'm just curious when you were looking at the architecture did did the idea of an extended table where you have types of or classes of requests broken down but you still have this parent record to allow you to transfer them between the groups we have um we actually did extend the task table when we built the the primary table for uh production support um so we do we do utilize an extended table technically um our original architecture went down with a different table for each group and once we got the looking in there and the number of fields that are reused across all of the groups and the information that we used across all the groups it kind of made more sense for us to stick with that single table and so that was part of the re-engineering process was to undo the multiple tables that we had done and build them all into a single table so it's a very busy table but um I still think we've made the right decision as far as how the process flows among the groups and the way they're able to resolve the tickets so something else you might want to consider if the for is getting kind of busy and I just used one of these this last weekend for the first time in years are look at something called view rules so you can set up a view for the people that need that perspective information that was a terrible word so you can look at a a discrete view of fields tailor to that group or that class or category or type or whatever you want to Define it and say for this type of request this is how I want the form laid out and it will default to that view based on that type but if you change the type or change the assignment group or whatever the view will change accordingly so you can still have this single table with masses of fields on it but form fitted for the use case you're looking for yeah that's a great idea it's something we've looked at and um unfortunately we're pretty far down theout rabbit hole at the point and so sure re-engineering that part is kind of you got hundreds of thousands of requests that would be a bit of a change yeah yeah Tina wants all the new stuff we don't want to change all the old stuff yet so fair enough now you already hinted about W to add all the new stuff what does the new stuff mean are you do you have some things that are on the list to add to your application next yes we are looking at um things like now assy and Creator AI um for now assist we like the idea of case summarization um greater AI you know we're trying to turn more of our production experts into citizen developers and so we we believe that would allow us to um speed that up a little bit and give them a little bit of assistance because they have great ideas but transferring it into the technical side is often difficult so um and we're also looking at you know knowledge creation um how we can automate that a little bit better to get um more robust knowledge articles and RPA robotic process automation is something we're we're heavily looking into we have a lot of requests that come in that unfortunately that unfortunately involve having a a bodyit at a keyboard and transfer data so some of these come in by the thousands at the time and so if we can introduce something like RPA to offload that workload form for a short period we have a quick gain there very exciting stuff Tina anything you'd like to add that wasn't on this shopping list yeah I think he he covered it um specifically like case summarization there specific teams that work with like guideline exceptions and so they they have asked for that um for quite some time just because they have to consolidate all the back and forth and like here's a summary of of what we discuss what we've approved and how you can move forward so that's going to save them a lot of time with RPA I'm very excited to see that just because a lot of our uh teams have like interns that you know do button clicks so if we can remove that all together that'll give them a lift and they can focus on the more complex problems very cool it sounds like there's still lots of opportunities out there for you congratulations once again on winning the devies app of the year for 2024 how did you hear about the devies yes so we had some conversations with our service now team um obviously this has been a big Topic in all of our meetings with them over the past couple years and so whenever the debies came around we actually had Kane or our rep suggest looking into the Debbie he says hey you guys have a very robust product you ought to look into it and you know see what you think and so we also had a little bit of encouragement from one of our uh prior admins Cameron who was on the team and Tim both and they both had a good idea and said hey you guys really need to submit your applic your you guys really need to submit your application for this it's something I think we've put a lot of time into and um it's it exemplifies what the Debbies is looking for that's fascinating I I expect to hear we're getting around from other developers and admins because those people are typically the ones also at the Creator conon keyot I am stunned this was brought up by your rep too like that makes me so I can't tell you how happy that makes me personally to hear that like nontechnical people are also hearing and advocating for WB that makes me so so happy to hear and I'll pass that along to our greater marketing team that has been really pushing to get the word out there because that will mean a lot to them as well speaking of them um we also are trying to continuously improve and learn more about the customer experience of this process so can you describe the experience of taking this from an application to being something that's on stage at knowledge and any feedback also that you might have absolutely with the production support application we knew we had a product that solved a major issue within our environment um however we looked at it and said well it's really great for us but I don't think anybody else is going to get too excited about it so uh even though we thought that we went ahead and submit our entry uh just to be in consideration uh once we learned we were a finalist we were extremely excited and honestly like if we' have stopped right there we'd have been perfectly happy with the way it worked out um but it didn't stop there and the next step was a pitch video so uh the pitch video was very daunting um got to thinking about it more of course we made a bigger deal than we probably could have out of it but we're very fortunate to have an excellent internal production team who jumped in on the process and ran everything and I mean absolutely nailed the quality the video U so that was definitely a load off our shoulders um next was the interview with a panel of experts at service now which whenever you get a notice that you have an interview with a panel of experts it's going to make you a little bit nervous that your product may not stack up but yeah the interview the interview was a lot of fun um we really enjoyed it and um it was it was a very laidback interview or just question and answer very conversational um but it gave us a chance to talk about our product in a little more detail and answer some of their specific questions um so that was a lot of fun um and then it came time once we we were notified that we won um it was a long wait until the actual presentation of the award so uh we were very nervous about it but very excited to have all the work that we've completed over the past couple years you know it's come to a a recognition that we couldn't have imagined so it was it was a lot of fun got us out of our comfort zone and um we really enjoyed the knowledge conference this year is there anything you'd like to see changed I don't think so is a great process um very well organized at knowledge and yeah it's a great process we're always open for input if you think of something later let us know Tina I haven't heard from you in a while so I'm going to ask what advice do you have for anyone who might be considering entering the debies in the future yeah I I think if you have a product that you're you're proud of and you've put all your time and effort like for me and Josh like this has been our everyday life for the last 3 years and so if you have something that you've worked so hard for and and you think you even have a shot you might as well go for it um like you said before it gets you out of your comfort zone but I almost took it as like a challenge and an opportunity to grow because this was a lot of first for me this is first time doing video presentation or interviews doing podcasts being in front of thousands of people receiving award for recognition of of a job that I've done um so I I would encourage anyone you don't have to be the most social person the most outgoing person to do this because I think Josh and I are pretty introverted so this is like completely out of our Norm um but we've we've pushed push through and we we've gone gone through it together so um yeah just have fun with it and and submit what you got Josh anything to add for words of advice nope I think Tina pretty well summed it up it's a great process and very hon to be a part of it oh we're happy you are part of it as well well thank you both for joining us today it has been so much fun again congratulations on winning show those trophies off proudly I've got my de's hat on even though the listener can't see it thank you for joining us today before we leave can you let the listeners know how they can get in touch with you yeah I think uh Christina Vincent on LinkedIn is probably the best option for me and the same for me Josh marber on LinkedIn I'll have links in the show notes if you need help with spelling that dear listener and thank you for joining us again thank you dear listener for joining us and don't forget to check out the other service Now podcast you can find them all over on our community at servicenow.com Community under the events menu 14 or 15 of them in various States of uh production and frequency I'll call it look some of them haven't put a podcast out in a while we might do something about that you can subscribe to any of them including this one to get them automatically delivered to you never miss another episode again breakpoint is brought to you by service now executive producers would be me and Lauren and to find out more about about the developer program we invite you to head over to developer. servicenow.com again once again thank you Tina and Josh for sharing your experience congratulations again thank you thank you all we appreciate you all please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servicenow.com thanks for listening oh how fortuit us we're recording a podcast on the devies this morning the devies is our annual app of the Year award created to recognize outstanding achievements to the service now pra to by that doesn't make sense that I always say with the utmost love and respect do it again start to become a ritual don't worry this part's edited out anything you didn't like no we expected it we've improved you can subscribe to any of them including this one to get them automatically wow that sounds nothing like what we said magic of editing where am I what are you talking about what am I looking for Lauren I'm sorry I'm getting very confused CH that is entirely my fault and that's how a podcast is made all right I shut up