hey good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone super excited to have you all join us today let me just double check you're able to see my screen well okay all good so very warm welcome to the July 2024 session of employee Center Academy we have a really fun topic for you today so I'm super excited um for it just a little bit context for those who are joining for the first time um employee Center Academy is a series of month events it is hosted by the product team and we call experts from all over the company to come and help present um deep technical guidance as well as feature deep Dives on employee Center and any related capabilities I kind of think of this as the lecture the monthly lecture on the product that you should kind of attend if you um if you join this session one you are automatically invited to all the monthly events so um super glad that you could join today you can also access all the upcoming and past sessions on the community you will see the link come in on the chat pretty shortly and then the recordings for these sessions are available on YouTube what that means is you can use the time to essentially just consume the content today and not worry too much about taking notes cuz you will have the recording this is your time when you should ask your questions there is a Q&A panel we have a set of panelists who are also Manning the Q&A panel along with the speakers so uh rest assured your question will be answered throughout this one hour today and uh would love if you can just use the Q&A panel for questions and the chat for any comments again the session recording and slides will be available they will be available on community and takes about a couple of days or so for them to be available the topic for today the most anticipated question I I suppose up till now is migrating to employee Center we get so many requests my employee Center has been out for a while but we still get so many requests for like a Playbook that one could follow as they are looking to migrate to employ Center or employe Center Pro or uh or even moving from an external system especially if you're thinking of an intranet kind of use case for employee Center Pro you're moving from external systems like sh Point Drive and migrating into employee Center some of the things that we will talk about today will be super helpful your speakers um first of them is me my name is Puja Gupta I'm an outbound product manager who also hosts this um Academy sessions for employee Center many of you might have already heard from me so I'm not going to spend too much time but the chief guest for the session today is Andrew swallow who is joining us from service now's expert Services team and is is super involved in actually making employe Center deployments at customers so Andrew you want to just quickly say hi and add to that introduction yeah so I'm in the more Consulting area handson so I'll be bringing in you know kind of tips from the trenches and how we do implementations here at service thank you Andrew and um the agenda is that we will dive deep into the steps to migrate and then as you think about the migration and your post go live uh we will also talk about some of the things that are super critical for you to consider but before we go deep into it I wanted to just you know quickly bring every was back into why you should migrate apart from all the cool features and capabilities that you may have heard with employee Center this slide kind of highlights or summarizes some of the key attributes that make the migration to employee Center uh super needed or like super powerful so first thing foremost if you would see the left hand side of this um donut um at the bottom we have employe Centric what that means is employee Center is designed to be employee Centric and what makes it employee Centric are a couple of different things first it's truly unified it provides a unified experience for the employee not just from bringing all different service departments and different kinds of um like the organization touch points into one single experience it is also unifying The Experience from a Content perspective you have one place to go for all kind of content from any Department one place for like any data that you that employee would want to have uh access so it truly provides a unified lens from an employee perspective it's om Channel um meets where the employee is it's designed to be personalized the content is targeted to the employee um Persona it is targeted to uh you have uh to like the kind of content they have been using you have machine div recommendations um ability for the users or employees to be able to tag things to personalize them and so on so it's out of box is designed to be extremely employ Centric that itself is the first big value proposition of migrating to employ Center second is the way employee Center has been built it's designed to be preconfigured with the many um different workflows that you are probably working within service now it comes with many pre-built Integrations um that are already embedded in the experience and then it is also extremely dynamic in nature no longer you need to maintain portal Pages because those portal pages are automatically built for you depending on the content that you have tagged for that topic you can actually build Pages using Rich content to create a a different in kind page experience so all of this is extremely Dynamic that makes it really easy to deploy and maintain and then of course since it's built on service portal platform there's a lot of configurability options that are available and we're building a lot more with each widget and then if you would think about just the whole platform that service now offers it is focused on being integrate like easy to integrate easy to extend every capability that is being added in employee Center is is added with the lens that today it probably just works with it and HR but as a customer or as a partner you may want to add additional workflows so extremely extensible by Nature um we will hone upon all of these different things as well as we will talk about the steps to migrate cuz you know you're going to make use of all of these different attributes of employee Center to design an experience of choice so let's get into what does it take to migrate so on this slide we've kind of put an overarching steps or like phases of deployment as if you can call that and it starts with the very first over here which is to understand employ Center capabilities many of times I've seen people rush into um deploying without fully understanding what all is available in employee Center and what is about to come so it's starts from there then it goes to designing the experience information architecture or taxonomy within employee Center is a big deal it drives the whole experience that you get in employee center it's one of the biggest steps it's marked as third over here but it's uh it's the most critical step you're migrating content in if you don't already have content within service now if you have content within service now there's no migration because it's all built on the same platform so that's why you have that if needed under the step four and then it's on on step five over here once you have defined what you want to build from an information architecture from a design perspective you have your content ready that's when you actually start deploying The Experience on the portal and then you want to test it you want to plan for launch and you want to like you know Drive adoption now I have these steps laid out very sequentially over here kind of mentioning that you would iterate but many of these uh steps also overlap to give you an example the plan for launch and adoption is not necessary something that you would do at the very end it's it's not that waterfall in nature you would want to plan for launch and adoption much much in advance May probably when you are deploying or like thinking about the design that you want so um I recommend going through service Nows now create methodology we will share the link for it we have like a whole success packed associated with employee Center uh as part of the now create methodology which will give you content and different uh uh tools that you could use in doing that entire entire deployment so we will cover it as steps but remember these are not waterfall these are more agile um the next question that I typically get asked is around how long it takes and it really just depends on multiple different factors s when you start thinking about how long it will take to migrate first and foremost is of course how custom you want to be so if you are being out of box you're probably doing this much faster than someone who is trying to really have their own take on the design and changing the look and feel quite significantly um then content availability the quality of your content whether you are migrating from an external system that means you have to recreate your content um do you have stakeholder alignment how much time you need to spend to get to a common Vision um are you deploying underlying capability as part of your migration like AI search uh virtual agent localization framework or are those things already preconfigured and you are just looking at the portal or the front end of it all of that has an impact on your migration now you may not believe me but I will want to bring in Andrew who kind of does this if like for many projects to kind of talk about how they scope out their projects how long it typically takes for them to implement employe Center yeah and let me just start off I'm a consultant so I'm G start with it depends uh when I try to scope something out you know you have to come up with you know what are you what what is the scope what is the resources so that's what I attempted to do here in the first two uh but I've done between 20 and 30 implementations and one thing with the employee Center standard so not pro is it's it's usually tagged along with a larger effort right and so it's not just doing that it's usually in conjunction with cleaning up and um you know getting rid of maybe customization and doing more out of the box and that kind of stuff but just I just took um some stories I have pre-made with an estimated amount of hours and kind of took that and said okay if there's one full-time resource you know what are we looking at so I would say two to two and a half months um if you really are just focused on that employee Center standard item with Pro things are a little more intentional folks are usually sold on like the content publishing and audiences so that you can really tailor The Experience so for my scope there I'm saying the MVP is kind of focused on all the normal setup of employee profile and all these different things uh in in addition to that content publishing audiences so trying to give that a scope I still didn't feel super confident just saying a very specific amount of time so I did three to five months I thought what would help if you're looking at you know estimating out this yourself is to look at some of the things I look at when I estimate in Pre sales which is you know how many U custom widgets do you have how what's their complexity and trying to break that down into pieces that I you can confidently estimate and then you know if you have 20 or 50 right that's going to change the amount of hours quite a bit I also look at micro sites so micro sites take time to build out that content and then if it's on a standalone page you're gonna have to create that page or if it's a dynamic topic page you know it's already there and then I have things I added this third bullet because it's something I hit a lot especially when I'm doing global companies is the multilingual support and this isn't really employee Center pro at all there's a platform stuff localization framework and machine translation and stuff so kind of you know that is a line item that I kind of look for and add to the scope uh and then there's features so above I try to scope my features around you know outof box standard and content publishing campaigns and audiences along with what I would call normal um configuration but every three months new stuff comes out you know February where brought us the survey content uh or ability to do surveys so as there's more features there's more possibility to add to that but what I liked about the previous slide is the iteration so we'll hit upon that as we go through these but definitely looking at you know what's your MVP in iterating and adding more features on there um and that's you know bua just mentioned too that uh there can be extreme cases so I have some customers who you know they have they have a lot of ideas and thoughts and and things that aren't necessarily easy Pro but kind of go along with it uh maybe some extreme branding and we'll talk a little more about some of my suggestions there um and then the big thing you'll hear me talk about over and over is research ux research and how to incorporate that so you have a smoother launch uh and kind of set up for six cents um and then again just like I said with the standard it's usually tagged along with other work streams so you know how many other people are we coordinating with is there other uh groups that are involved that we need to you know coordinate with I think that kind of covers it yeah thank you Andrew a question came in which I thought is a really good one so when you say one technical resource here is that the dep like is it like U like could you talk about all the other resources that are typically involved cuz you know it's important to to think about your resource plan as well yes so um that's another depends thing on when we when we go in uh we have things called a staff log and that's how I originally started was I am embedded in your team uh and then we have the now like a fuller team especially with a larger implementation and you know service now likes to own the end to end there um and there's a little more assurance is uh that that things will be delivered and so in that case you get an engagement manager you get an engagement manager even on a staff hog but you get a more involved one um with these kind of more time and materials uh and then we have a business process consultant typically uh they're looking at creating the stories and owning that um and sometimes a solution architect so it will depend on the makeup of the the team the size of it um when I put down one technical resource that is a developer that is the person going in configuring um you know and they can kind of crank crank that out but you might you know you'll have project management um but yeah that's my team is mostly the technical uh resource that actually goes and implements and we'll talk to the customer you know it depends too on when we come in you know some people have already done their stakeholder management some people are asking our help for stakeholder management so that's going to bring in more of the bpc and the EM so business process consultant and engagement manager and that's I know that service now terminology so think of that as like um product owner or program manager and like scrum Master something along those lines okay thank you awesome that super helps um so essentially you need to think about resources more broadly depending on the scope of what you trying to do so um that's helpful let's start getting into our steps um we have a ton of content to cover here so I will probably go a little fast um but please keep your questions rolling so first one when you think about understanding employee Center capabilities it's important to understand the product vision and goals and that's because the capabilities that we are delivering are often in line with that Vision um you want to understand all the different capabilities that are offered features that are offered within employee Center and this is really helpful so you're not looking into customizations um in especially for use cases that are actually delivered out of box pretty pretty well um the customizations that are made to replicate the outof boox functionality are typically the ones which create the biggest technical debt um so if you have an outof boox functionality available we always recommend you to use use that that's why understanding what's available out of box is super important and then as you start thinking about deploying especially if you're migrating from an existing portal experience you want to completely understand what you are going to get when you get to employee Center um and and we'll talk about this very briefly but employee Center has a certain take on you know how the what a good employee experience looks like and uh you would want to understand that before you start thinking about designing the experience and uh and you know of course deploying The Experience so what is the employee Center Vision we are actually the vision focuses on building a unified layer and that is not just for services um it's Services if you are thinking uh mostly employ Center standard um but as you start thinking about employe Center Pro and a little bit more modern and sophisticated portal you are looking into proactive Service delivery using actionable Communications you're thinking about Employee Engagement and you are thinking about actually driving uh self-service and productivity by unifying access to system and bringing in data from external system so it literally adds as the Enterprise front door or the employe destination side which is what the organ which the the employee would start with so that's the vision that we work with um and that may not align with where your organization is today and that's that is very very common many or people that are actually deploying employee Center end up starting with a single departmental portal whether it's an IT portal or HR portal and as they start getting value they are moving more right uh in this um in this journey over here um adding more departments um moving towards an Enterprise Service delivery portal and some of our more advanced ones are moving towards a modern intranet they have also seen iterations that they have a single department and comps on it to make it an intranet but you still have certain other Service delivery portals so the journey can look a little different but the good thing about employ Center is once you deploy it it's super easy to scale it for additional use cases and you don't have to redo the implementation so the typical recommendation that we have for people is that go ahead and deploy it for the use case that you are ready with today and then as you start getting value from it build the buy in for doing more you don't necessarily have to start with the vision that we are painting for employee Center but at the same time you still have to think about it now another thing that I want to call out with employee Center is that it's not a completely new technology from a service now perspective it is is built on the same service portal Tex stack that you probably have already been using um in your uh environment in some capacity I'm pretty sure you have an IT portal or an HR portal that is built on service portal employee Center is using the same text tack that's the same technology that you would use to Brand the pages build new pages Define custom wigets and all we have done is we have built some additional outof boox capabilities and packaged it as like two different layers one is employee Center which is available for everyone and one is the employee Center Pro so you get more capabilities on top of the text tack which are pre-built now if you have customizations that you have built on service portal because it is on the same text tack it can be easily applied to this new portal that is SLC hope that makes sense if you have questions on this please post it on the Q&A Channel and we will take it so just to repeat on this slide your customizations can easily apply on employee Center because it's built on the same deex stack when you're moving things from service portal to employee Center you essentially just pointing to a different portal and the access for the employee is now through that portal but it is the same same thing so if you have like catalog items built you're not redoing any of those catalog items or knowledge articles you are just the way an employee would navigate to them is changing the content itself is not changing that brings me to the comparison from service portal to employ center now if you would think about service portal it was very bare bone it had the look and feel for it is not that good it was actually designed to be a demo portal and uh um we didn't have any existing uh outof boox portal that uh customers could use so a lot of them started using the demo portal uh and made it their own so employee Center was actually the first time when we built an a unified or like a a service now take or product for actually delivering services on service now and it is designed to take that employee Centric personalized and modern approach out of box instead of having separate experiences for knowledge for catalog for requests we now have like a Consolidated uh experience driven through taxonomy instead of having icons and like different boxes we now have like the um the more fancier quicklinks widget recommendations like popular topics I'm not going to do a complete comparison but it's good for you to understand whatever you have deployed how that would compare or where that would live in the new experience um Andrew you want to add any practical tips yeah I I come back I come from a sort of Enterprise solution architect background where we would launch things you know over and over you know different Services Etc and so this is pretty near and dear to me uh which is when you do anything you want to get your stakeholders and I'll give you some examples for employee Center Pro you probably want to look at your ocm team your CH change management team your corporate coms and branding uh and then your service lines like who's in who's in charge of announcing uh service changes and updates new Services because that's going to come into play especially around announcements and the audiences um you know and then of course your service lines or whatever you call them whoever your service owners are who need to kind of you know create some a little bit of marketing or content to help people decide to use their service so getting that stakeholder and then the other big stakeholder I kind of look for is who's the executive sponsor so I'm big on getting an executive sponsor um and have them have a level of understanding they don't have to be experts um but they have to have some level of understanding and when I kind of think of that Enterprise architect background you know I think about bringing in uh Frameworks and Frameworks give everybody common terminology uh you can also bring in you know method methodology and so that's what we try to want to do at a kind of a smaller level is get that broad understanding of what employee Center Pro is what it has and how to leverage it and we want everybody on the same page I will sometimes see folks you know go and grab uh let's say a design team that doesn't really know the platform doesn't know employees in our Pro and so they kind of back themselves into a corner where they have these mockups that don't really incorporate the product and at the end of the day service now is a CO product customizable off the shelf and you want to start with offthe shelf or what we like to say out of box and customize on top so that's a big big part there then when you get to the vision you kind of have options you know you want do you want your part of the possible so in my previous job we decided we wanted employee Center to be our One-Stop shop or a single paint of glass so we had some you know things around that concept as we launched we had a big executive sponsor uh some people don't have the big executive sponsor so you're doing it you know more more smaller level but you know getting a vision having common shared goals is a big deal and then the business value metrics sometimes we'll see that come in uh through analytics you know people will say like oh people are struggling with this and that's where we sometimes go beyond employee Center deeper down into the other products because it might be servicing at the portal level but it's really something underneath and and the honest truth is nobody knows knows what is employee Center and what isn't right it's all one website for them so sometimes we have to go deeper sometimes it is something like again with employee Center Pro people are usually looking at that targeted personalized uh experience and that's more within the wheelhouses employees Center but we might uncover some other pain point or something so the metric is more around like removing that pain Point uh you can also do uh user research around your current state right and then do a similar experiment or uh research you know six months after your launch and then you have a Baseline and something to compare against right so that's another kind of strategy out there we'll talk a little bit more about some of those studies later on and then yeah the road map helps just in the road map helps just in that vision and how you're maybe iteratively getting to like the bigger Vision out there and my last thing real quick is the three hype video that plays at the beginning of all these uh sessions um employee Center Academy sessions is out there on the internet and if you need an executive sponsor to understand roughly what you're doing you know it's hard to say no to a three-minute video and I would I would leverage that three minute hype video as much as possible in your own sort of internal alignment of everybody all your stakeholders awesome thank you Andrew and then uh we have a ton of resources to help you get started um like everything from acad uh Academy sessions to features and capabilities which type dive into FAQs road map webinars and also a lot of now create and now learning resources so uh you will have the slide deck you can go through these resource list later on moving along let's talk about designing the experience and now this again starts with like you know building a shared understanding of what you really mean when you say user experience or improving employee experience what is the implications for your project you also want to Deep dive into human centered design um experiences um sorry methodology to really get to know your users and and as you are designing it you are really engaging with them for the new design and and you're as you need to kind of articulate Your Design principles and processes so we've kind of summarized the um human- centered design process that service now recommends um I will share some resources um that actually go deeper into these tools that are mentioned over here and each of these stages um another thing I was trying to call that out in the beginning as you think about these stages you know maybe first and second which is defining your goals and designing the experience is what probably starts happening in the front end but as you start de developing working with more of the as you start getting handson with the portal um deployment you would want to go back and refine the use uh experience the design that you're working on you're evaluating with the user experience um that you have actually built on that uh deployment so the step two is not necessary only done in the beginning so you don't build a design and then you leave it and this is what you're trying to deploy you're iterating and you're you know sort of evolving the um the design as you are learning more about your users as well as what employee Center offers um Andrew again I'm going to bring you in to talk about some practical tips that you could share um from your experiences yeah so I have the Autobox configuration you can do that with PDI but also you know lean on your accoun team and have them bring in some sales stroks they have demos and stuff that you can you can get people in front of um now 90% of my customers are more out of box with low these high value low low impact customizations I'll cover that a little more later too um and then it is is worth saying it's worth getting somebody that knows uh how to set this up especially your initial time and then have them kind of train your internal resources to maintain and run and grow and then the last point is kind of most my kind of my kind of nearest to my heart I guess which is you know start looking also at in-house user research uh certainly you can hire it and then but as I go into these different U engagements I'll ask customers that they have a in-house user research researcher and a lot of times I'll get a note and I'll just say well check with your HR check with you check around and they'll often find one so there might be a hidden researcher already in your uh in your company and and you just need to find them um it's definitely worth worth growing and paying dividends over time but we'll get into yes we will thank you Andrew and then yeah so stick to outut of box minimize customizations work with a partner and uh talk to your users don't design without talking to your users um right so lot of resources over here as well the one the couple ones that I really want to call out we have a figma library available so if you are trying to stick out of box you want to know or you want to work out of the design that is shipped out of box you want to start with the figma library so um and and pick up the designs that service now has and modify it as you need so really want to call that out and then we also have a big training that talks about the process that I just articulated or summarized um it's called user experience for service now so I would recommend you to go through that as well okay let's talk about information architecture now information architecture is defining your entire browse experience uh within service now uh we're not talking too much about search here because we have like a pre-existing page for search and then you it's a whole different configuration for like configuring AI search but if you set up your browse experience right your portal experience is pretty pretty good um and this gets into not just the taxonomy but like all the other pages that you're creating like manager Hub or maybe you have a page that talks about careers or you have a page that just talks about your organization how would they all align to create a more like employee Centric navigation flow is is a very very important design element on the portal let me give you an example of an information architecture so if you would see over here this is an Enterprise level mostly an intranet kind of uh so if you're doing an intranet on employee Center and this is like the front end uh for all employee use cases you would kind of build an information architecture like this so you have Pages which talk about your company you have pages that that are just for services you may have pages that are dedicated to a manager news and like just a quick quick links to like support and so on so this is an example of an information architecture and you can see because this is at an Enterprise level there is no like it's like there's no clear at the top level that this is it this is HR um there is some of it under help center but it is not at the top level so you kind of have to build your um framing of how you want to represent your organization on the portal I have seen um like really good um um information architect to K andai it with like their company's culture um messaging as well so so for example within service now itself our top level taxonomy is like grow it's work and uh you know engage or Empower something like that um so it it kind of ties with what what we as a culture are trying to build so example of information architecture now core part of the information architecture is your taxonomy again I'm not going to go super deep in it but just the idea of taxonomy is that you are building a a single hierarchy of topics to navigate to all your content so as you manage content as content creators you probably have a different tonomy that you are using for um Knowledge Management so like you know you have knowledge categories you have knowledge bases within knowledge different knowledge base you have different categories um similarly for catalog you have different knowled catalog categories you have different cataloges you may have an IT catalog you may have an HR catalog um then and so on from an employee standpoint you're actually creating one single hierarchy which is connected to all your knowledge bases all your catalog um and and categories within and you're not surfacing the backend categories and knowledge bases at the employees so all that complexity of how that content is created and where it is created is left in the back end and you're only using the topics to to simplify access to content and these topics are actually driving experiences including topic pages on the portal site um so this is very important to understand as you are designing and defining the information architecture it literally drives your whole experience so how do you build this tonomy uh first and formost we we ship an outof boox taxonomy which we have tested with many organizations um most organizations who have uh who have followed this steps over here the first step over here is the uh let's to start with outbox taxonomy have been able to create their taxonomy pretty quickly um so the idea is that you start with the aob Box tonomy you map it to your existing content the Autobox tonomy is already designed to be in employe Centric language so you pick that you map your existing content categories to it you modify as as you need to maximize coverage of your content and then you are conducting exercises or research studies like card sorting and tree testing to um find gaps and uh also validate your tree test your uh your mapping of content with the taxonomy so lot of organizations or customers come and ask like can I see some other company's taxonomy um honestly that would didn't give you much if you just pick up the outof boox taxonomy that is your example of um uh what good looks like and we ship two separate taxonomies for like I mean actually two separate information architectures for employ Center standard and employee Center Pro so they will both give you the idea of what what it could look like um and just want to bring up like I mentioned two techniques I won't go super deep in it but car sort is literally working with uh users real users and making them you know work like sort the cards and the cards are essentially topic names uh to put some certain uh content in it so you will actually using card sorting you will really get to know what terminology people are using sometimes they would create a card for um a topic that already exist because they didn't really realize that topic is is what they were looking for you can do this both offline as well as um in person and of course the number of people you're able to engage is different um yeah I'm not going to go super deep in it but you can read through this slide later on similarly tree Testing Tree testing is typically done more to validate than to build the uh tonomy and what you're doing here it's literally a tool as you can see in that small screenshot on the right side of this page it's just giving a list of it's giving you the hierarchy it's giving you the that are available no other portal element is visible because you're using a tool and uh what you are testing is is the user clicking on the right menus to submenu uh to reach the content that they're looking for so it's just testing whether your tree of topics is is accurate or un well understood or not um it often helps you identify um where you need to cross stack things uh validate if you have categorize them well and so on definitely something that I would recommend you to do and in fact do often um a couple of more best practice advice this is a really big topic you should think about assigning topic owners and as you assign you have the you have the ability to do that in the portal and as you do that they are the ones who are responsible for maintaining the topic content this will also become important in The Next Step which is migrating content so thinking about who would be an owner for this topic is helpful and if you are employ Center Pro your Rich content can actually make these topic Pages act as micro sites on that topic so consider using that and then your navigation structure for employee is the tonomy topics so don't replicate your catalog or knowledge categories don't expose them and and minimize the number of topics you don't want like 30 topics for an employee to explore because they will get lost so set an upper limit typically we say no more than four no more than 10 per level and that should give you a fair um Fair navigation structure and then Advanced portal navigation is what you would use to kind of like you know uh intermix pages with tonomy topics aligned left align right and kind of create the the browse menu that you want um anything else that you would quickly add Andrew on this yeah you covered a lot of it so um just I'm trying to think of anything to add here you covered card sorting tree sorting um definitely recommend getting a piece of software for the card sorting um and then just when you when you use your topics you no longer you can retire the service portal pages around knowledge browsing knowledge and browsing C cataloges and you can take that as an opportunity to instead like adjust your user criteria and your ownership so your knowledge bases and your cataloges now become more about performance and ownership I think that's that's what I have to add you covered a lot perfect thank you Andrew right and then you have the resources again some really good stuff from Community now create all of that um I see a question on why should the knowledge categories be different from topics um and that is mostly because if you're thinking about knowledge categories they are done depending on how and who the knowledge team is who is maintaining um topics are essentially bringing in not just knowledge but also catalog also Communications also quick Lings they are the way I like to think about it they are like the is and the aisle names that you would put for a shopper who is trying to uh buy something in a grocery store whereas knowledge categories is essentially how the shopkeeper is organizing or managing the the content that is in the Isles so they are meant for different audiences um it's often hard to tie the knowledge categories uh to be in the same as how an employee would be browse for some organizations they may be closer but for most organizations they are very different and you would want to keep them separate all right so migrating content now you only need to migrate if you're migrating from an external system and I'll be honest here there is no magic wand you there is no content migration tool you literally have to like you know manually migrate content if recreating that content within service now I have seen some people like you know not migrate everything they kind of migrate some of it and then make um rest of it either searchable especially if it is SharePoint we have an online uh SharePoint search connector which you can you know you can choose to keep certain content in SharePoint and make it searchable um via employee Center Pro or you could also um just add links to certain content which you think needs to stay in the other system so um migrating content is important if you're letting go the other system and moving to service now and there is no content Tool uh migration tool that's available so plan for this ahead of time and what we typically say are like this first you need to define the criteria for migration you most the best practice that I have seen organizations who have done this successfully is that they don't migrate all of their content they actually use this as an opportunity to see how what how content is actually being used and migrate only the quality content so you want to define the criteria for what is actually getting migrated it takes effort to migrate so you want to use that effort on things that are actually needed in the new system and not clutter it so um def that and then employ Center offers a lot of different content types so you have knowledge articles you have news you can build uh pages with Rich content um um you can have banners and so on so there's a lot of different types of content within employee Center as you think about uh your content that your migrating you want to Define some guidelines on how you will know what you are creating um like in what content type you're moving it to and then you want to have some design standards you are recreating the content you don't want it to be a complete lift and shift think about how you will make that content more engaging with the use of images icons bullets um like not having a full block of text having paragraphs uh and so on then the number four is very important as you start thinking about the migration you need to have some topic level committees that are are looking Gran into individual content items and making that go no go decision so the topic ownership that I was talking about in earlier is extremely helpful so this committee defines like you know this is the content that aligns with this topic we should we should probably build a rich content around it and add it over here it's a knowledge article that we can tag to four other topics so all those decisions this topic level committee is is doing so very important to have that and then you want to engage authors if you're migrating ton of content you want to actually engage authors to help you with the migration so like if you have these steps in mind this will be helpful um anything else you want to bring up uh uh Andrew like especially things around uh deciding what content types yeah and I I wrote that out here of just like you know knowledge articles are going to be your your technical content your help right how to how to solve problems but your Rich your micro site it's going to be like marketing and information uh and then news and banner announcements you know more that uh time bound like here's what's going on um and I did put in some things I I've seen where you know maybe an engineer decided to migrate a bunch of content from SharePoint write a script copy paste the HTML in and you know when you look at that within the KB article or what have you you know just to be aware that you know you're service now is responsive so it's going to want to change uh size down to mobile it's not full page width so I've seen some some things there where you just want to make sure you're actually going through your content you're not just picking it up and and setting it in there but you're actually going through and then the other thing is more around you know designing and that'll be on the next slide too but uh Progressive disclosure is more like where you have something expands so in the rich content there's a tab so the tab has a title it tells you what going to be on that Tab and then when you click on it you get the information that's Progressive disclosure uh and kind of maybe staying away from what's more exploratory design that's what you'll see in learning development where it's like you have a quiz at the end so you go hit the question mark and learn more about something right uh but there's no context of what that question is that's just my point there of things I've seen is you want to really think about people are trying to scan it and consume it quickly get their answer and move on that kind of goes to the next slide here just put some resources out there um you know when we say six to eth grade level you know some people will say oh you know I'm engineering these are professionals it's not about somebody's intelligence it's about how we consume uh sentences you know we can at that level we can consume and retain them better uh so there's different stuff out there in neon Norman group accessibility is another piece it's usually more around contrast service now itself uh has has a lot is accessible so it's about your new content that you're creating and making sure it has proper contrast and ALT tags and things like that I think that's what I got there thank you Andrew yeah I mean nilson Norman group is really helpful in stuff like this so I would recommend that as resources um and uh of course work with your partner too um the meat of the migration the actual deployment um so not going to spend too much time on the bullets here but we'll share the whole process now I'm not including the creation of content if you are creating new content that is a separate exercise um this over here the steps are highlighting what you would do to deploy the experience and these are a little bit more higher level so you may have some additional granular steps but essentially you first want to make sure you're using the latest employe Center plugins from store um we have a quarterly release and store releases means that they are Backward Compatible with two releases so even if you're not on the latest family release you might be able to leverage and get the latest store release so I highly recommend that then there are steps like setting up your portal theme you may want to if you have designed your you may want to think about what CSS variables we are looking to change Beyond just the portal theming options that are available all of that is is what you're doing you're setting up the information architecture that is both building up the taxonomy and as you start thinking on working with Advanced portal navigation you would want to think about what new menu items you are creating to surface up the right external links uh portal Pages or whatever you want to expose as part of your navigation so you want to set up that then you are making widget configurations and this is everything you that you have in the portal that is your headers Footers um quick links if you are you using employee Center Pro then things like manager Hub you're setting up that whole like out of box widgets you're setting up employee profile now employee profile is a separate app that you download towards the end of this deck we also have listed all the plugins so it is easy for you to get hold of them but you're setting up the employer profile so your employe profile page experience is available um that is both with employee Center and employee Center Pro and you start thinking about more Pro then you are doing things which are more integration based like you're setting up the app launcher um you may be doing the SharePoint search connector you may be thinking about approvals Hub the these are these are the bigger pieces for employee Center Pro as well CU you are actually doing the Integrations which can take time then the six and seven are more e Pro but if you go to eight then you're thinking about ownership um that's part of your deployment as you're actually assigning that role to people um and you you probably should have decided as part of your earlier discussions but you're actually starting to assign topic page ownership topic page contributors um you if you're employee Center Pro you're thinking about um content publishing ownership so you can actually Define what type of communication contents a particular author can uh can have the access to post where to post and for what audiences to post so you really want to think about that and Define in the system and then analytics um we highly recommend you to activate analytics uh again a core part of uh um making sure you are being successful uh as you deploy and finish um so analytics is definitely important and last but not the least um especially if you're moving from Custom Service portal Pages we have something called page route Maps um you would use to like you know move from old pages and redirect them to whatever new page or new experience that you have built on employee Center another thing that uhu I want to highlight is um like if you built employee Center the URL uh that is associated as your instance name SLC um you can actually change it to be whatever you want so you if you go go on service portal configurations um you can actually rename your old portal as let's say it was s make it SP Legacy and rename your employee Center deployment to be/ SP or if you want to be Innovative you can use a new name so think about that as well as you start deploying and preparing to test and launch um very high level you can consume this later on um anything like there are quite a few practical tips over here that uh Andrew uh you want to take some time to take those yeah like I said about 90% of my folks stay out of box with very little customizations uh but a lot of times when I look at those customizations that they're especially just like service level um you know I just want to remind folks who who go out and do this that you know CSS overrides uh can be can handle a lot and there's a whole thing I could go into with CSS but a lot of my stuff you know I'll see you know people who they'll take the training on how to customize a widget and when all you have as a hammer everything looks like a nail so they'll just customize the widget but keep in mind there's these other other things you can do to pull off you know very cool branding uh that looks like customization but you can do it through CSS over uh but if you do need to touch the Autobox widget I do recommend touching um the Autobox widget directly instead of cloning because it'll the the Version Control a it'll give you skip records when you upgrade so you can you can kind of see your Tech debt and then if you go into the widget you'll have versions it'll say history you can compare the history version with your current version and kind of you know start incorporating the outof Box stuff the new features and and layering your customization so that's your Tech that that you're going have to handle uh and then the other thing I see a lot is people just hardcoding strings in there so I work with a lot of companies that are Global they want to support multiple languages so the developer has to make sure they're they're um you know wrapping them in the proper calls and there is an instant scan out there by Alex coup that will actually scan your files and find those hardcoded things for you to remate so I often install that on a especially on a customer that's been around for a while and the last thing is you know the first time you release it's kind of hard uh to push this but you employees Center is meant to be used in production all the content management stuff and it's not the same like a lot of folks want to follow that standard move up the sub prod path and everything update sets uh and you know an ideal situation you wait to production I will say sometimes I have to you know create content each Sub sub uh um environment uh in order for them to you know folks to test or or be okay with it uh before it goes up to prod but definitely also recommend like continuously pushing to prod and kind of adopt you know because this is a whole new portal with a different uh prefix to it you you can actually have it up there alongside your current portal and that you know you can have it up there you can start uh doing these things in production uh rather than waiting for a big big bang launch uh thank you Andrew um all right again one of the key resources that I would highlight is employment uh employee Center deployment office hour um monthly event uh we do a lot of Q&A and questions around hey how do I do X how do I do why so I would recommend you to take that and we can take questions from all of these over there moving on let's talk about the testing experience and essentially there are three different types of test thing that we would recommend you to do and these are all all of them have specific goals and really important so first and foremost I think everybody does that is like the functionality testing like you know this is to identify technical bugs development bugs that you probably have as you as you buil the system almost everybody does that but two other forms of testing which are less commonly done but are super essential are usability testing and performance testing so usability testing is that you're actually pi picking up your top three to five portal use cases and making sure the design that you have built you know it takes time from the first time you spoke with the user to actually building the system you want to make sure your assumptions that you are have been validated um in designing and then you are looking for opportunities to further improve and identifying design Gap this is very important um later on when we get to the launch uh we will talk about having a pilot phase or a soft launch you could use that phase to do the usability testing but we highly recommend it second one that we recommend is performance testing especially if you think you are doing an intranet use case you expect a lot of traffic on the portal uh you are a large organization with a large number of people um even if you're not and you're looking into like just making sure your system is robust performance testing is important so you're checking for key business flows you're checking for surge scenarios things like let's say you're hosting a large company event how would that performance be for that um it's um it's something that you can do load testing um we definitely recommend you to do those we have some resources that talk about how to do it you can also work with your service now team and service now Partners uh to do an comprehensive performance test um but something that you should plan for for sure and then anything else that you would add U Andrew uh I'm just going to say like about most of my customers are just doing the normal uh testing steps inside the stories so I had to do a call out if you're really into cic pipeline uh things like selenium or Microsoft Enterprise has also web test uh you can also I know with the Microsoft you can spin it up into load load testing uh and that leads to number three which you of covered like you have a big event your homepage is heavy it's got a lot of queries going on there's a lot of stuff for that homepage to handle so putting that into its own little micro site own little section so if you have like you know an event where you're asking tens of thousands 100 thousand people to go hit you know that's a tremendous amount of load uh so it's best to separate that out away from the big heavy page that's trying to do so much for that user experience uh and then the pilot users so just you know know just like any roll out for like benefits enrollment or changing from you know Windows upgrades or what have you and you're typically doing phase rollouts with a certain amount of users at first and kind of growing that so same thing here find your pilot users get that feedback uh use that to make better KB articles or help or uh guided tour which is the last thing there which you're asking your users to adopt a whole do portal with a lot of different concepts on that homepage so I at least uh recommend doing a guided tour on that homepage help introduce uh the website to them awesome thank you Andrew and then you can of course like read through these further as well last stage but not not really the last stage is uh planning for launch and driving adoption now there's a lot that goes into this there's a whole ocm like or organizational change management practices that we recommend you to invest in but I wanted to actually just share an example uh of the launch and adoption plan that we had um from one of our like this is not the recent one but when we rolled out employee portal um with that Vision that we just painted for employee Center within service now they kind of had so you would want us like couple of things to point out here they started off way in advance so like you can see that the planning started like more than two months in advance of uh when they were actually planning to go live and it started with exec sponsorship so they are they are thinking like you know um who who are our exact sponsors um and they are thinking about the roll out plan and key messaging right from there and then when you think about the create artifact phase you can see uh things that are talking about leveraging in inbuilt capabilities on the portal for example um an announcements um what's new videos that you can just put in it um we also have the the guided tour that uh um Andrew was talking about can also be leveraged over here uh so create your communication content that sits within the portal but also outside um lot of campaigns again it says a celebration almost when you are launching a new portal um I've seen many customers even you know engage further gamify it by doing a competition for um naming the portal or being on the portal to do whatever so um there's a there's a lot of um effort that goes into driving change and doing a successful launch so this will give you an idea of what all goes into it um we the resources that we have will give you more but we definitely want to share some practical tips uh cuz it's not that easy so Andrew I'm going to lean over to you again to kind of do that yeah so my my first thing is from a technical side consider that soft launch and doing more of like a devops feature toggle um I have some you know this is a separate portal there's one overlap with like the employee profile so you maybe decide if you want to opt into that or not uh but by and large everything else will be separate from your your existing service portal and so I'll have customers launch it alongside maybe even Market it on the old site and call it the beta and you know direct people to go there and give feedback and really what you're doing is you're managing expectations right with that beta you're saying hey you know not everything's perfect but if you want to come check it out and give us feedback that would be great um the other thing is we talked about you know card sorting we talked about um usability studies and as you do these research especially the moderated oneone sessions this creates uh SK scarcity persuasion it's a marketing kind of item where people feel special they like to be listened to this creates Goodwill I often get thanked by people who are volunteering off the clock to come to my study and they'll thank me for listening to them really I I should be thanking them for volunteering their time right and so this all this builds up a sense of ownership it also makes it creates this um the you know this positive um environment as well and and it's because because you're an Enterprise because you often have these employees over years you know that can play dividends over time as well especially if you get different people overtime full-time researcher um you know you're you're kind of spreading some Goodwill there uh and then that kind of leads to my second one I'll have people who kind of shy away from the critics so some people you know leave feedback that isn't you might even arue isn't very uh professional on on feedback forms and people will be afraid to engage them and you can only get better can to improve if you seek out that criticism and often when you sit down and meet with that person one one they're not anything like you know you know they're emotionally charged review I've also had places where or times where like a VP will leave something like that and nobody you know is everyone's scared to go but you get them on the phone you talk to them they're very pleasant they then get that scaredy persuasion you're turning them from negative into Advocates and so that's a little o tip I'm actually going to skip down to number five because it ties into that so as you do your research and then you do your you you create a feedback loop you can put that into your announcements on your homepage and say like hey we did a study we found out these things these are the changes maybe you're talking about a road map maybe you're talking about changes that just happened but that creates social proof persuasion and so and the probably the simplest example of that is when we go out we buy something something we're looking for the five star review and like thousands of reviews you know that gives us confidence where we see five reviews and two stars right we're not that's your social persuasion um so now you're you're creating that sort of Goodwill as well uh when you actually tell people about your improvements and how you drive uh and then the fourth one I'll just kind of throw out there real quick it's something I've been tracking uh as I go from company to company I try to get folks uh in this kind of role uh to to research and so in my old place of work we really uh focused on this group and I'm learned as I go and work with different ocm teams a lot of them will focus on them as well uh you know we're trying to put things in knowledge bases and articles and do a Knowledge Management uh strategy there of repeat and help but there's always tribal so you need to realize like folks are out there your ocmt may know of other groups U but this is one group I try to put on people's radar of they're super influential uh tribal tier one two support sometimes highly organized you know seek them out see see where they're at some really good nuggets Here Andrew thank you so much all right so um we did an academy session on this um you will see a ton more resources more on genetic ocm on service now as well um with that I want to start wrapping up and talk about you know very quickly about what drives success post migration and no surprises here governance if you want to um like you know really get value out of governance sorry about from your deployment you need to invest in governance and there are actually three levels of governance that you need to think about first is strategic governance this is the top level this is how and when you're engaging with executive sponsors senior leadership and thinking about what value you are uh realizing through the portal how you would want to evolve the vision the scope and so on and honestly this is the level of Covance that I have seen to be most neglected in organizations so I would double down on this one and say you should think about it second is having technical governance this is more around um you know having a road map features and capabilities road map for the portal managing that from like the upgrades that are coming from service now and then validating it with a good user uh user uh research and design practices uh and so on who's involved here is typically your head of departments they are the one who are saying hey our department was looking for this particular use case does that make sense to be implemented on Portal how would that be implemented so so the head of departments and your business stakeholders over there are driving or influencing your technical road map so you need some coordination around there so it's not that the loudest voice is being prioritized or you are building features that are for one department and not useful for the others so you need technical governance and last but not the least I think it's the biggest effortful effort wise is content governance so you want to make sure your content is not going stale so you are maintaining it you are being updated you are collecting feedback on it and closing um the feedback gaps that you have and and and so on um your your experience is only as good as as how good your content is so this is one of the biggest ones as well and who's involved in this is actually the all the people who are writing and creating the content so I've seen many different practices on how this can be improved mov d by use by good use of dashboards gamification techniques having the right incentives in place um so thinking through how you will um govern the content creation and management is the third lver now some practical tips um these are three different very thing like different levels to think about so you actually need and um need to identify and Empower a a defined owner for the portal experience um and that that owner is who is driving these different governance tiers it could be different governance committees and and that person is leading it um to ease the content governance you probably need to have very clear guidance on what you are building um and and and what your design principles are um this will also help your technical governance CU you know like you are able to say when you are C customizing does it align with your design principles um and and so on and and you know so having clear guidance on both the experience and content creation designs is super helpful and then the third tip that we have for you here is that you want to democratize content creation so don't make it like especially as you think about Communications it shouldn't be like one team that is creating all the communications it will soon become overwhelming so you want to like have have many different um content creators like across your different department groups and uh you want to provide the right kind of ownership to to manage that you know people who don't have rights to create Communications in other places are not creating so um that's important and you may not have this set up in the very beginning so you can start simple and slowly build out groups who can edit content in prod um you may also Al want to think about having a mentor who is teaching how to build the right kind of content in uh service now so it can be a journey it is again a new tool that people would have to learn to build content on so having a mentor having some trainings internally will also help um then the last but not the least is that you need to think about continuous Improvement and this goes like from all the user exp research studies and qualitative research studies we've been talking about but also leveraging what's inhouse like the employee Center Pros Integrated Service and experience feedback capabilities um user experience analytics and also performance analytics dashboards all of those are available for you to leverage all right um we went a little over on time but hopefully this was helpful and want to close it with some more resources around governance and continuous Improvement like I mentioned are we we do have some appendix here so you can see different plugins that will give you a better understanding of as you start deploying and then I would say um leverage our um um um employee center community to get further details