you're listening to accelerate a service Now podcast series about achieving your business outcomes where we talk about how to get the most value from the na platform hey everyone this is Crystal Clevenger and this is Dri we're your hosts and excited to talk to you about service now value acceleration solutions that include expert Services training and impact it gives me great pleasure to welcome mck Brickner to to the show today hi Mick hi Crystal thanks for having me thank you for being here so what don't you tell me what your role at service now entails sure so I'm a service offerings manager in our customer outcomes function uh and specifically I help kind of manage our service portfolio for our expert services or Professional Services organization and my role entails um designing building launching optimizing and improving and just managing the life cycle of the different services that our expert Services function delivers and our Consultants deliver um so that's helping identify opportunities for services that are going to bring value to our customers bringing together the different experts across the company to help design and build and then launch those services and then there's a continual service improvement aspect of this too where we're reviewing services and the different engagements um of those services and just looking for opportunities to optimize and improve those services and just bring more value to customers through expert Services very good thank you for that so I imagine that there are different types of services you're responsible for can you tell me a little bit more and tell me how they're categorized yeah when when we talk about our service offerings and our portfolio of services we typically break them down into three main categories so there's implementation Services advisory services and then optimization and Remediation services and we have um examples of varying size and scope uh for offerings in each of those categories okay so let's just start with implementation services and if you could expand on what they are who they're designed for and what they consist of yeah implementation services are probably our most common service um it's typically what customers are looking for at some point in their service now Journey um and probably the most common type of service that our experts deliver um it's it's helping customers enable a new solution or maybe expand an existing service now solution that they're already using but um are looking to kind of take it to the next level um and these implementation Services is really how you get to Value right helping enable and deploy service now applications on platform and and in your instance um these these are often for net new customers so customers that are new to the platform implementing things for the first time but also existing customers who are expanding on the platform maybe to other workflow areas or adopting uh or implementing more advanced applications and processes so it really applies across um all customers and at some point in your service now Journey might need help implementing right and they probably apply to all of our workflows I presume right yeah we have examples of services for all of our workflows okay across the categories so if you were to pick one that you could um go a little bit deeper on which one would that be in the implementation Services area yeah one example um that I love to talk about is called implementation design it's a newer service and um that we we put a lot of effort into designing and launching relatively recently this one's not a full implementation service instead it focuses on understanding the customer's desired outcomes and then designing a solution um using all the platform capabilities available as well as like bading practices and and design practices to essentially create a design um that that the customer can take with them and then Implement either with expert services or um with a partner or maybe they they self- Implement and there's multiple reasons why customers are looking for a service that focuses on the design activities first um and only and one could be that they have unclear design requirements or scope so it would be hard to try and estimate like what a full implementation would look like what it would cost the duration of it um so you can kind of take a modular approach and start with the requirements and the design first and that's that's really uh kind of a key use case and then you know the customer would have a good understanding of the required investment level and the effort that would go into configuring and implementing that design and this design could apply to any workflow or most workflows that we support today right yes this is one service that um applies across all of our workflows so if you can um think of an application or a capability in any of the workflows then we we have workshops and other activities as part of this offering to help um design a solution using those capabilities okay that makes sense you also mentioned advisory Services right and what's difference between those and implementation Services because I presume that when you uh when you sell and when you deliver an implementation service you do advise our customers so what's the difference for people who don't know yeah that that's definitely true our implementation Services typically include some aspect of advisory sessions um enablement that sort of thing right advisory services are more of like a Standalone advisory service so they usually include like some sort of assessment that could be like a manual assessment where a consultant goes in and reviews U your instance a customer's instance and and comes up with recommendations it could be an automated assessment using something like our health scan tool or or scripts oftentimes it's a little bit of both um kind of leveraging both automated and like a manual assessment and then based on the assessment advisory services will always include recommendations based on leading practices so you'll get findings from that assessment um and then specific recommendations based on those findings and that's typically where the advisory Services stop we we don't take the next step to actually Implement on those recommendations and on those findings um but those findings and the recommendations are all kind of packaged up for the customer to take the next steps with that makes sense so you mentioned using or health scan tool for example but are there other Are there specific Services you can talk about or maybe one um that would be of interest to our audience today yeah we have a we have a few in this area and and some are product specific uh one that's near and dear to my heart because I have a background in service catalog and service portfolio and IT service management is a service called service catalog unified and again this is an advisory service so it includes an assessment of essentially a customers service catalog and request management posture and maturity and a consultant will come in and do an assessment mostly a manual assessment looking at the different catalog items and like the health of your request management process and the nice thing about this one and the reason it's called service catalog unified is because they'll not only look at the catalog items and the workflows and requests you have in your service now instance but also those that you might have in another tool or on another platform uh in your environment with the goal of bringing together uh recommendations and consolidating all of those catalog items or workflows on your service now instance and create like a One-Stop shop for request fulfillment um so to facilitate that there's also workshops that are included as part of this service they focus on service catalog and request management processes as you can imagine and um there's also demos that the consultant will provide around different service catalog tools like catalog Builder flow designer employee Center and those are all tailored based on the findings of the assessment um and basically the maturity and posture of your of your service catalog processes so for example if the findings suggests that using order guides would be like a great way to bring together a bunch of related catalog items and workflows that might be spread out across your your environment then we'll take extra time to focus on order guides as part of those platform demos and basically enable the customer um on that that tool that capability that application so that they can take those findings and and act on them and this one's typically a seven week engagement and again you walk away with those findings and recommendations for next steps along with the enablement um through the workshops and the platform demos well you must have read my mind because I was wondering how long these Services typically take um so this one is s weeks the one uh you mentioned before implementation design I presume it it varies depending on the workflow it does it varies by workflow and because of kind of the modular nature of that one um there's multiple tiers as well so every workflow has one I'm sorry two to four tiers available depending on the number of workshops and applications and processes that you want to cover and design for that makes sense so it it's going to vary the amount of time you spend where the customer is going to vary based on the workflow and the tier that they chose yep exactly right and last but not least you mentioned optimization and Remediation Services as as the last category what are those Services yeah optimization remediation services are similar to advisory Services um they they kind of fall in between implementation and advisory in a way so typically those start with again some sort of assessment that's focused on identifying Improvement opportunities and then helping Define a backlog of of those Improvement opportunities or like development um tasks that would need to be carried out to remediate or optimize a solution um and then typically you get time with one of the Consultants to do handson remediation and optimization so the consultant will work with the customer based on that backlog that they Define and take a um a set amount of those stories and the consultant will actually help Implement configure um those those stories and and those Solutions as part of um the engagement itself so it's like advisory with with kind of impation yeah it's like a hybrid a little bit right between advisory and implementation you just take the advisory a little bit farther absolutely yep okay is there one specific service you can talk to me about that falls in this category yeah probably our our Flagship service in this category is one called cmdb Amplified it's another product specific offering that focuses on cmdb and related processes and and applications and tools this one starts again with an in-depth assessment the consultant comes in and looks at the health of your cmdb and they also use um the cmdb data foundations dashboard as kind of a a means to help them assess but also to enable the customer uh because you can use that dashboard to kind of monitor the ongoing health of your cmdb and track your progress and maturity um using that dashboard so you you get enabled on the dashboard along with the assessment then you'll work to prioritize kind of the key findings and like those remediation stories it also includes workshops and coaching much like an advisory service would so with cmdb Amplified you get workshops on cmdb governance there's workshops on our common service data model which is an important thing to understand along with cmdb and then you get the remediation so essentially the configuration or implementation of a subset of your remediation stories and for cmdb Amplified you actually get 20 hours of remediation time with a service now consultant um so whatever stories make the most sense to implement um and and leverage our service now consultant for in those 20 hours that that's what you can can walk away with along with all the other kind of prioritized stories this one's also a seven-week engagement so similar to service catalog unified um you walk away with the remediation the prioritize stories and a little more enablement uh and understanding of cmdb and and the dashboard that you can use so finally what would you recommend to someone who's interested in learning more about all of these Services you talked about yeah I the most important thing for us is that our customers get to Value and can effectively enable all the platform capabilities to solve for their business objectives and desired outcomes um I think the best thing for you to do if you're interested in expert services or any of the offerings that I mentioned today or or anything in our portfolio is to reach out to your account exec um they can put you in touch with your services account executive who can help advise on which Services might make sense provide more detail on maybe a specific offering that you had in mind perfect well Mick thank you so much for your time really appreciate it this was very informative thank you so much [Music] I'm Crystal Clevenger and I'm D adri and this is a service now accelerate podcast series you can find us in other service now podcasts in the service now community at community. servicenow.com be sure to follow us in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss our next episode