all right Kate we'll go ahead and get started here again welcome everybody my name is Shane Yost welcome to our webinar we've implemented installed now what I'm Shane Yost I need Salesforce for our ServiceNow business and service management practice at KU best ik joining me today is Kate Baldwin who will provide some awesome content on kick starting your ServiceNow instance throughout today's session and as we progress through today's session if you have any questions please feel free to type your question into the question field located on the control panel we'll do our best to answer the questions at the end of the session but if for some reason we're not able to get to all the questions we'll follow up with you via email also a recording of today's webinar will be emailed to you for playback or sharing with other members of your organization who are unable to attend with that let's get started so Quebec is a full-service consulting firm and servers and a silver ServiceNow Partner headquartered in Kirkland Washington we have over 250 senior level consultants with an average of 15 plus years of professional consulting and IT operations experience and we have been delivering service management solutions since 2001 Kabakov Essex expertise is divided into three areas our IT operations service practice focus on developing standardizing and operating IT operations function including cloud and enterprise infrastructure security operations application administration and operations build and run our project delivery service practice is focused on providing project leadership to deliver complex IT projects Kove esta vez experience in project management ensures compliance quality and timing of projects and deliverables to align with our clients lifecycle practices finally our service management because building practices focus on assessing defining and implementing optimize service management solutions with ServiceNow being our only ServiceNow service management solution to go to market with we have over a hundred and fifty implementations of ServiceNow under our belt with a CSAT score of nine point six and repeat business of the service of over ninety percent of customers that have a phase two or phase three to go along with us here's a snapshot of our clients and with that I'll pass it off to Kate to dive into in today's topic great Thank You Shane and so with that I just want to thank you and thank everyone who's joined us today just a little bit of background on myself I've been with Kovac since 2012 I specialized most frequently within the IT Service Management IT business management and HR Suites within the platform though I have worked with in other areas as well including GRC facilities and others I've been working with ServiceNow since 2008 and prior to joining cubistic I was a full-time ServiceNow administrator on the customer side of the house so I know what it's like to to be in that chair in addition to that I'm also I told certified and have achieved my PMP certification as well and previously when I was working in IT operations I served in the capacity of a change manager release manager and Technical Program Manager taking on activities like migrating data centers and other enterprise projects so have been in that role of trying to deliver best practice IT services within an organization so in the ServiceNow space and in particular working with Kovas tech we've had a lot of opportunity to go out and work with our customers Oh Shane said we have about a 90 percent repeat rate where customers come back to us because they're ready for some additional help whether that's expanding the platform getting support with upgrades or maybe it's been a while since they've done anything and they need a little kick so what we're going to see here today is a bit of a conversational tone as we go through and talk about and share some of the guidance that we've shared with other customers over the years as far as how to how to get that ball rolling again if it's been a while since you've implemented or if for any reason your instance has gotten a little bit of stray in that time now for today's agenda what we're going to go ahead and do is we'll go through and talk about what it means to assess your current state and known issues from the perspectives of you know process your technical system and with organization and then we'll talk about words so some recommendations for refreshing your golden roadmap some things to keep in mind when you're reviewing your technical options and also some ideas for when you set up your ServiceNow program just to make two videos it'll make forward paths a little bit stronger and then as Shane said we'll have some time at the end for a little bit of Q&A so be sure to put those in the chat that you'll see on your screens and then if for any reason we can't get to all the questions and this time we'll be sure to follow up with those after now what I want you guys to keep in mind as we're going through and talking about these different areas today are just some key questions that'll be both driving our conversation and giving you a point to bring that focus back in with each of those areas so think about when we cover the topics what did we do so what did you do within your organization as you were going through your first implementation or subsequent projects and then the next is what did we miss so it's important to be a little bit self aware as far as those closeout practices so within good project management taking the time at the end to review you know what went well what didn't go well because both of those answers are going to give you a better path forward and then in the conversation as well how do we fix it so what are some ideas what are some things that other groups or companies do that we've seen that leads to success to make sure that we don't run into the same issues as you go through it a second time around you know Kate you know working with our customers over the last eight years I think there's three common things that have come up often and that we're faced with it's you know the process technology and organizational changes seem to be the top of their list can you dive into each one of these areas for us and you know give us some insight on the importance and the impact I certainly can't so let's start with that process evaluation so one of the things to keep in mind is that there's three main areas where people tend to go wrong so the first is poor planning also development and in the space of end-user communications and training so when we talk about poor planning that very first question of you know what did we do so for your business what's that right balance between sustainment and development as you're looking at what's on the board or on the table going forward have you defined within your organization what that percentage should look like for your staff so should they be spending 50 percent of their time on development than 50% on sustainment or does that split need to be more of a 30/70 and is the split different for different staff members so if you've got more than one person on your team just making sure you know what that should align with as far as just the day-to-day time spent against the different activities that are on your backlog or on your plate four things to do with that we also recommend making sure that your service know program is aligned with your leadership subjective so if your business leadership are doing you know annual budgets if they're doing their annual goal-setting making sure that whatever those goals are those outputs are are aligned with what your plan is so if they're saying that they want to do a bunch of tool consolidation that should be reflective within the scope of work that you've got geared up for the coming year likewise if they're looking at maybe rolling out a new HR suite for example that you're planning in that that balance of time to commit to the development required to achieve those goals so making sure that both the numbers line up and that the line up now from a development perspective you have to ask the questions of where best practices followed as you went through the first time around so one of the things that we run into a lot is service now there are many different ways that you can achieve things and then if you have an older instance the suggested approach may have changed over time so those are some things to keep in mind as far as what you want to do going forward another question to ask is how many cooks are in the kitchen so do you have multiple admins who are in the tool who are making changes is any of their work conflicting or colliding with each other very important to know if people are in the same space making tweaks or adjustments where one person's work could impact the other because what you don't want to do is if you're going to invest that time and development you don't want to roll out bugs into an environment that maybe was okay without it also making sure that you're doing good testing of any updates or updates that's that you're moving into the system so making sure that once the development work has been done that you've got sufficient testing and that's not just testing from an administrative view but making sure that you work with people within your organization key stakeholders for example if you're rolling out a catalog item for a new team so that way they have their chance to get their hands on it and make sure it's actually meeting their needs because sometimes there's a difference between what someone asks for and what they actually need so having good testing is going to give you an opportunity to find some of those gaps before it gets into your production space and then in addition to that we also have you know have to ask ourselves do we do a good job communicating with our end users did we do a good job training them so you know what are the practices what are the methods that you're using to inform the business of process changes so if you have catalog items coming out new knowledge bases being presented you know are you doing that through emails newsletters are you doing any internal marketing like posting flyers throughout the office they're just making sure that you really take those actions to share what's being done in addition to that making sure that there's enough training just adoption so typically if you've gone through a phase one it's very common to have some level of end-user training that's shared and presented but we'll find that you know two weeks three weeks four weeks maybe even four months after that people don't absorb a hundred percent of what you share with them in a training so it's really good to come back and revisit with your users and say hey let's go do a deep dive session on reporting or let's help you figure out how to make dashboards for your team or maybe something that focuses on what a managers needs our versus of the fillers just so that way they can navigate and use the system a little bit better some of those things are really going to help your adoption and then in addition to that it's always important to ask your end-users if it's enough right so being able to use the surveys that are in ServiceNow to communicate with them and ask questions of that user base and say are the things we're building you know working for you our you know our brown bag sessions do they provide enough information those different things that are out there that can give you an idea of of whether your customer base is happy or not internally because again if they're frustrated they're more likely to ignore it move away from it and sort of give up on some of those topics but we really want to make sure that they're enthusiastic about service now that they can see potential in it and maybe bringing some of their forms into the system some of their process into the system to help that trajectory so the next area that we'll get into is around technical evaluation and I know as I've gone on shires I've talked to people especially if it's a phase one some of what we will run into is how do we know what we don't know you know and I had been an admin that was a really common thing so as we're talking about what you'll want to consider for what you have done in the past let's be sure to ask ourselves with our release version and our upgrades are you making the effort to stay within the last two releases for support ability service now and hi are expecting to have you stay current with the system and to be adopting the new releases as they come out so making sure that within your organization that you're keeping a currency of the platform and then when you're going through those activities considering the functional impacts so what that means is being sure to test both the new features and your existing process so for example if a new release would do something to impact what you are already providing to your end-users making sure that you've tested that and identified it before you would move anything into production so following a good release path of do the upgrade in your sub Prada instances first do your testing there make any fixes there with update sets and then move that forward until you get to your production environment with that technical evaluation you know asking yourselves what are we doing today as far as cloning back so when you clone it's going to make sure that those your sub production and your production environments are really in sync that's going to increase the consistency between them it's going to make testing it's going to facilitate testing make that a lot easier and it's going to mean that as you're moving updates that's between your instances that there are less issues so if you're not cloning with any sort of regular process it might be time to consider whether that needs to be planned for on a quarterly monthly basis or at minimum to make sure that you're doing a fresh clone before you begin any new development or upgrade efforts again just to facilitate and make that testing go a little bit smoother now as you're going through that technical evaluation one that we get into is customizations so you know we call it the good the bad and the ugly because there are so many different things out there that can happen as far as a customization space so some of the things that you might run into would be you may have had admins who scheduled activities like large reports or data imports at bad time so if the original implementers weren't thoughtful about your hours of business for example you might find that some of those imports may be causing some performance issues during busier hours there could be issues with data imports that maybe weren't set up well with their transform apps so you could be bringing in bad data inadvertently causing duplication or proliferation where you've got you know many types of one value you know you've got five different Microsoft's on your company table for example and then also you know in addition to checking your transform apps you know being sure to check your business rules because a lot of times if you have a system that's gotten a little bit aged or a little bit older you might find that some of the work that was originally done either from a customization or even configuration standpoint is that was using old practices so if you're looking forward or going back to do some cleanup in that space you would want to make sure that you weren't using you know the current add update to avoid recursive business rules you would want to check your code to make sure that you hadn't hard-coded any values in when you could use a system property instead you would want to make sure that any coding is written as functions so they're easily callable and making sure that any time you're doing custom work or making changes to out-of-the-box code that you're commenting out the reason for that or maybe associated it to a story or or a bug or a future or something so that people can you know track the history of the decision for why those are made so those are some of the things that you would want to be evaluating as you're looking at your system you know looking at the guts of it and then also is you're evaluating what you've done in the past is you know take a minute to explore how far have you gone within the platform so ServiceNow has quite a few different applications and plugins that are available without incurring any additional licensing requirements so some of the things you might want to look for in that space would be just different plugins that would allow you to adopt a new functionality without even having to have a new release go through release upgrade without having to you know pay for any new functionality so some of the things you might look for might be the tasks outage plugin which can support service availability reporting or the service portfolio plug-in which provides your informational business Service Catalog and with newer releases the major incident management which has a really nice process flow now in some of those places you may find that if you have an older system you had already built out some custom work but if you choose to adopt the plug-in or use the new allottee that's coming out with newer releases being able to sunset the custom and take advantage of the new out-of-the-box out-of-the-box features that are out there so just some things to think about again really just evaluating the same questions we gave you earlier what did we do before you know did we miss anything and and what can we do to make sure that we don't miss it going forward and the last area that you had asked me to talk about Shane was the organizational evaluation so this is a really big one really easy to miss because a lot of times I think people tend to think that if you just get the right tool that'll fix everything but we do know that sometimes people when they're building out a new instance for example they tend to build what they know so it's very common that people will rebuild you know maybe the same process they had before that wasn't working it doesn't always make a lot of sense but it's really easy to fall back into the habits and fall back into the things you know so you know as we transition between the technical and organizational what we would look at here are asking are we resourced sufficiently so the first thing to identify is how many sweets are in play service now is really Enterprise service management it had begun as an IT service management system but it has expanded considerably over the years so looking at the IT Service Management item the IT PM the CSM you know our governance regulation and compliance with the GRC and the HR suites that have come out really give a lot of opportunity but if that's happening you may find that there's been a consolidation of systems that consolidated administration as well so you might find yourself feeling a little low on headcount to support everything that you have so we really encourage once you've identified which Suites are in play and which ones are going to be in play that you identify you know the key key folks for that so some of the roles that you would want to consider in support of those different areas are do you have someone who owns the platform across the enterprise so someone who is at the top of the umbrella for all those different Suites who can make decisions against that do you have a program manager someone who's really going to drive you which projects are going to be in flight who decides which defects are going to be fixed and which features are going to get priority a lot of times you'll find that within an organization the squeaky wheel you know gets the oil or gets the grease but if you have a program manager who can help support service now and that individual is going to be able to align the needs of the organization that maybe you got from the survey maybe that you got from your leadership's you know board retreat combine that together to actually make a good strong proposal of how to go forward in addition to that you've got the question of do you have different administrators by suite very commonly you may have a different administrator in HR space because of the data that's involved or that's being contained there that's quite a big suite within the platform you may have a developer or someone who's handling integrations with other tools and systems so if you're gooe if you move into item making sure there's someone who understands event management for example in the different systems I don't know too many businesses who have just one monitoring system most tend to have about three or four it feels like and then with that having someone who is comfortable wearing that how do a business analyst so being able to go out and interface with your internal customer base you know talk to people and find out what opportunities there are to bring their process into service now now it's unique about all of these is that a lot of businesses don't have enough headcount to support all the different roles so that does ask us you know it's the right person in the right place so going through the activity of putting together a racy chart to make sure we know you know who's responsible who's accountable who do we consult as far as being a stakeholder and who do we simply keep informed if you've got someone trying to wear many hats it's good to know is our team sufficiently trained you know I don't know any company that doesn't have a staff with different skill sets and different backgrounds and experience so making sure that you know what each person brings to the table as far as the role and the responsibilities that they have and then with that as you think about you know the potential for single-threaded admin being aware that there are other ways that you can reach out for support so whether that's internal support that you might get from like a PMO office or external support that you would get from a vendor like kava stick okay thank you for diving into those three areas for us there I think those are hot topics for every one of the organizations I've worked with over the years you know I mean service now over the years has many ways of leveraging the product to satisfy different company goals a I think a as we talked about moving forward here a common component of success is the ServiceNow platform roadmap you know through the upgrades over the years new functionalities come on to come out there and it's really as you mentioned it it's really turned into an enterprise service management tool you know tell me tell me the importance of of the roadmap and maybe some best practices around it definitely so yeah that takes us very conveniently into our next slide so as you said having you know refreshed goals and a strong roadmap is one of the best things that you can do for maintaining your system and so as we have talked about in our assessment phase you know being sure to ask those questions is the output of that assessment is really going to drive what we find here in building a roadmap going forward so from those conversations you may have had with your stakeholders that should have identified some new opportunities that you have from looking at the release that you want to upgrade to being able to go through the feature list and say hey you know that feature aligns with this group over here and this one aligns with that group so how do we prioritize that and bring them together so if you know everything that's available to you that's going to move you in the right direction so one of the things as part of that roadmap is identifying those opportunities and then in addition to that making sure that you do a tools inventory every now and again especially in the IT space right just because something was the best two years ago doesn't mean it's the best for you tomorrow or your business process needs may have changed you know you may have gone through some process maturity or you know your business structure has changed so with the tools imminent or you can consider you know what can be consolidated what can be deprecated and what can be integrated to make sure that you've got really clear strong data sources to help normalize that data so there's more trust in the information which ultimately improves reporting long term and then a great time to do that just from sort of a timing perspective if you've gone through any sort of M&A you know merger acquisition for your business or another or if there's been a reorg internal e those are great great times to do with tools inventory just just kind of stop pause and say hey you know let's find out what they're using what we're using and what we should use together or going forward because tool proliferation can really happen right so being able to consolidate and keep all of that together in one home is a really great thing to do with that we had talked about doing a survey of our stakeholder needs so if you've got new leadership that's a perfect time to come in and make sure that whoever that new leader is maybe a new VP a new CIO that you talk to them and you find out hey this is what we had as our roadmap before but what do you have in mind going forward because oftentimes that new leadership means the new goals are going to come into the business with them and then the other thing to consider again is that manager needs may change over time so if different teams get consolidated we may find that in that manager needs some different support so that might be changes to their catalog items maybe some changes in a knowledge based structure just to support their day-to-day operational experience the other thing as part of the roadmap is you're putting it together is to look at and track your license counts so this is something that's can happen in a phase one which is that you might identify there are some groups and users who got missed in the first two go live maybe they weren't in scope you know maybe they didn't exist yet you know if you're looking at something that came out of a reorg and so you can go through and say hey you know we missed this whole chunk of folks who who are associated with IT that could be getting items instead of sharepoint forms so let's go ahead and see about bringing them in you know it takes service now to them see if they can see some opportunity there and maybe bring them into the system and then as part of the license counts the other thing that's really important for that roadmap is to figure out if maybe there's something that you're not using you know if you had bought a bundle or a package of sweets within service now and you had never enabled something setting that roadmap is a great time to say you know we're paying for something and we're not even using it yet so let's do a little bit of investment in some projects to get it up and running and and to get us maybe out of another system into service now so doing that that tracking that inventory of your licenses and what you're using is really useful and then again as part of that it's just making sure you update that with your annual business cycle because you know I t's very fast there's a lot of changes and it's really easy for a roadmap to get outdated but I think that ultimate goal is you just really want to get a good return on your investment you know service now is a great product a big product and you want to make sure that what you're putting into it that you can get back out of it and then again reducing reducing cost or you can it really does tie back into overall business goals so with that part of the keys to that successful roadmap is making sure that once you've you know pulled all that information together and set that tone is that you do have explicit ownership you know you may have someone a number of people who are consulted along the way who are informed along the way but you do need to have one key owner who's responsible for it and can make the key decisions to say this year we're going to invest here and not there because I don't know an organization or a business that doesn't have some constraints whether it's around the people to execute the work you know from a time perspective budget you know from maybe additional licenses that might be needed or not needed but an owner who can make those key decisions to say this is what our focus is and this is what we're going to be working on with that as we mentioned before being sure to review and refresh the cadence on that is needed to fit within your business cycles and then making sure that you're aligned to your overall project portfolio so if you have a separate PML making sure that your projects that they're aware of them so that you're not you know vying for resources with other teams as there are other business projects that are happening throughout the year so I would say that's that some of the key is there you know Kate I think I think these are three great areas to consider here because I've heard so many times customers tell me we had a road map but no one followed it and you know I don't think there was the ownership there I think I think maybe a source now admin had a road map or or something like that or the product owner had a road map it wasn't it wasn't the ownership of the company it wasn't it wasn't aligned to the strategic goals of the company and I think I think if you follow these three steps you can you can keep that that roadmap from becoming shelfware or you know filed away in that little little black car that's the thing underneath your guess that we call trash can all right yeah it's it's very true because as soon as it's drafted it starts to expire just like any other type of data so having it be a living document a breathing document a document that gets referenced maybe at quarterly meetings you know status meetings I think is really important and if you've got an owner for that they should be the ones bringing it to the table you know pointing back to it and saying hey you know this year we said we're gonna do these three three things and we didn't do it so those questions you asked in your evaluation always be evaluating you know always bring be bringing it back out and doing refreshes against it it's really important you know look at some initial questions coming in I think I think you just touched on a key point is is this is a fluid living breathing plan you know and I think your second point here is to review and refresh refresh the cadence on this because you could set out goals they want but after after the organization starts adopting some new processes it's a new way of doing things it's going to open up some other opportunities for you to look at that you may not have thought of before so you know I think I think maybe maybe having a couple people or a couple teams involved in this road map to get some consensus and move forward with it and and have almost kind of like a qbr session around you know these periodic reviews of this road map is definitely going to help out with the adoption right and those quarterly business reviews you'll see that's part of the recommendation recommendations we'll talk about as we go into some of the program recommendations that we would have as well which are coming in just a bit you know okay I think I think this is a spot that's often forgotten you know the technical component of service now a lot of people look at a solution and and they say all the technical part is taken care of what are some considerations we need to look at sure great question some of the considerations that are out there are you know we in our first half of this conversation we talked about doing our assessment you know identifying if there's you know good release practices identifying if you veered too far from out of the box identifying if there have been any issues in the coding or in the development along the way and again not to point fingers but just to say some of those best practices have matured over the years as far as what's recommended even so maybe what was great in Berlin just doesn't work you know well in Jakarta anymore so as part of that what I would recommend is with your roadmap you know with your program with your leadership making the decision to say now that we've done our assessment we know where we stand with a platform we have to decide how we're going to move forward and so there are typically you know three key options or directions that someone might pick so they may opt to upgrade a customer may opt to do remediation so with the upgrade or remediation that's keeping your instance as is and then moving forward from a point and then there's the zebu option which you know I've heard people called a nuclear option but what that one does is it will actually you know bring your instance back to a reset essentially so it's a wife and a restart and so I have seen and work on projects where that proved to be the best option once it was balanced with knowing maybe the instance had gone too far out of spec if you will and so when you've done your assessment you can do a pro/con against each of those different paths and identify you know what's going to be the best investment to go forward and it's not even uncommon to do a Z boot in fact we did have one project that we'll talk about as a case study very recently we had gone in and partnered with our clients and had done about five weeks of assessment and we did an assessment because what we had found was that it was a global company and that there were different areas that were doing different things and we wanted to be able to consolidate them going forward to figure out how to best move their system forward and their process forward so based off that assessment we realized that they had gotten a little out of spec with the instance and that it Z boot was going to be the best option to do a reimplementation so we started from scratch we got him back to an out-of-the-box State we were able to include an upgrade in that so they had the latest and greatest features and releases and we had zero downtime with that because we had a cut over that happened that did include moving some historic data but was ultimately very successful and has allowed that customer to really spring forward from that point so you know that is sometimes the right option there are other projects that we've done where we found that what was needed by the customer was just an upgrade you know maybe I jumped two or three releases forward to bring them ahead and so it was really required there was to identify what was going to no longer work or be viable so you might be familiar with folks on the call the old content management system that's TMS that was used for the end-user web portals back in the day and then moving forward I believe it was after Helsinki the new service portal became available which was a total rebuild for the end user portal much more familiar much nicer UI but built off of bootstrap and angular and so with that part of the upgrade is occasionally rebuilding some catalogue items so an upgrade or remediation may take some work along the way to get it done but essentially taking your instances you have it and just doing cleanup within it that cleanup you know as I said there may be a cost balance some of it that will provide back in the recommendations of an assessment might be stuff that can be handled by the existing admins they just needed support and guidance to tell them what it was that really needed to be done to get them back on track so those are the things that the paths that you might choose in picking which path to go you have to identify what are your immediate requirements and then what's your long-term strategy so where do you really want to go and this is where you tie back into that roadmap so if you've done the roadmap work and that assessment work you should have a very strong idea of what those are as you talk about what's our path going to look like from a technical standpoint with the platform as you've gone through that you would also be identifying any sort of logical dependencies that might be out there and then what you have to do is make a final decision and stick to it and that's where we talk about having you know identified who those key players are the the owner of the system the owner of the roadmap who can support that decision and say we're going to start and we're going to end and here's how we're going to invest in it to go forward because it is an investment and I think it's good to acknowledge that that it's going to be an investment of time and of resources and funds and to support those because each one each path should be a distinct project with a start and a finish to be really clear about what it will take to get through that hurdle and really kickstart that system again so as you're taking action towards that the system on any of those paths it is important to know whether it's going to be handled again as an internal project or something that's vendor supported occasionally a vendor support it can be really helpful for the reasons being you know again it's tied to an investment within a project you have that start and end time that you've called out and pointed out and then occasionally having Outsiders can help mediate challenging conversations and sometimes provide insight because they've maybe seen more environments seen more places where similar things have happened and provide those recommendations okay I know I know this is a place that we've kind of worked several times in you know and I think in the case of jeld-wen you know they tried to kick off a a reset several times okay and then we finally got involved with them you give a little overview of what that might have been like sure so that came in two parts as i had mentioned there was a period of assessment which involves going out interviewing the different business stakeholders finding out about the existing business process for the different areas and then bringing that back together with recommendations for the system so there were some pros and cons with each one that we went through and evaluated and then based off of those workshops we put together a new set of user stories to say to continue using ServiceNow as the system here's what the business needs here's what my team needs this is what we were getting from the different managers and the different business process owners within their company and so based off of those user stories that we had again the output from that assessment work always driving back into the roadmap and the planning and the decision we found that z boot was the right option for them and part of that was that in their environment there had been some structural changes at the task table level that ultimately if they were going to try and continue to sustain that would have more ongoing costs as opposed to the investment of getting back to the studs and starting with his e boot and so we found that to be a successful path ultimately yeah I think I think that was a that's a key point when when you're talking about changes in the environment like that with with an outside vendor looking at those kind of things it's uh it's less of maybe a political blow and and an ownership kind of thing of hey we did this at one time for one reason but you know now there's another way to do things so thank you for answering that for me sure and I think it's normal that we find business changes right business needs change that's why we talk about keeping it as a living breathing document yep thank you now with that both of these areas do tie into kind of the last and what I sometimes think is the hardest you know the system itself can be very easy but the behaviors and the organization and the I hate to say the human component can sometimes be the hardest so what we recommend here is making sure that as you're setting up the ServiceNow program that you're publishing that program and when I say publish that means sharing it out to the business making it available making that document and it's iterations because it will change you know communicating that back out so what you're really doing and publishing the program on a quarterly basis or a yearly basis is you're managing the expectations of your end-users I can't think of anything more frustrating than someone having you know a new catalog item built for them that doesn't work right but if you didn't plan to have a little bit of time after that initial build to do some tweaks or remediation that might mean that they have to go back into the backlog with everybody else so you know you want to manage the expectations of your end-users both the customers who are asking you to build things and ServiceNow as well as the people who are just using the system and so I mean gosh there's there's a lot that can happen in this phase as well yeah and okay in in you know with the blinking at this in this program you know the the life cycle of a service now that we've seen over the years it can take many twists and turns inside of just IT and then they've extended it out to the business units you know you know I think I think the the new goal and then the new things to look at might be how do you plan for onboarding of new users new groups new capabilities and try to keep up with that backlog of requests that are out there right and yes a hundred percent yes on on all of those points it's hard I think is you know first and foremost it's okay to say you know this is can be a challenge to manage but the way that you can make it manageable is to build in predictability transparency and visibility so again publishing that program is really important and as part of that you want to communicate your SDLC process so people know what your release cycle looks like so if you're doing release is every other Thursday that should be common knowledge when you talk to change managers or when you talk to people who are out there that oh yeah it's Thursday I wonder what we're gonna get this week you know it should be something that they look forward to but when you communicate that really because when you put that on a schedule it's letting people know hey if I'm requesting this at the beginning I might you know be behind a couple other people I might be coming out next Thursday I think and get really hard because service now it could be so quick and fast is that you'll get a lot of very little requests like small requests as an admin and you know the tendency is to just do it immediately but that's not a good practice because people start to think oh well he got his you know 30 minutes after I asked for it well we know on an administrative side there are different types of changes right so maybe that was a data change and not a workflow change something that doesn't need an update set versus one that does so organizing your program you know having an ST LC process having a backlog communicating what those commitments are for a schedule is gonna let you balance the defect remediation that has to be done when you have a live system as well as the new features enhancements that keep will keep people excited and keeps them coming back with that you've got resource planning so again knowing what that balance is that we talked about a few slides ago knowing who's responsible for the different things and then for a program because you want to have that longevity is if you're a manager in that space think to yourself that you're committing to regular training for your staff right so maybe someone who started as a analyst two years ago is ready to move into an admin role or a developer role or some other place within the structure I hate to say there's a lot of ServiceNow poaching out in in the greater business world but it's very common that you have someone who's really great and someone comes and tries to steal them which can make it all the harder to keep your program running so making sure that you're getting regular training for those folks that they're allowed to participate in the webinars that ServiceNow shares that they can study on Sabah you know maybe attend the annual conference where there's additional training and the different Suites is really important as well Shane did you have a question no I'm just gonna say if you talked about the training make sure you follow along with our webinars and ebooks and stuff too oh yeah great point great point we'll have some of those to share at the end as well and then if you do find that you have areas that you want to commit to a project that maybe you don't have people internally who are prepared yet or maybe they're busy you know keeping the defects going or rolling out some smaller features it's totally fair to engage vendors when it's needed right we have different programs that we offer we've got our developer on-demand which provides a bit of a retainer so ongoing support as well as projects so again with that return rate there are many customers that we've partnered with and I do say partner because they're continuing to do their own internal business and work and then they engage us for maybe some of the bigger efforts where they need maybe some of that mediation and support so that's a really nice way that you can kind of balance your resourcing both with internal and external and then with that committing to a public schedule so if people know that you're upgrading every six months or Jing let's clone backs that that ties in with how quickly you can commit to delivering what they asked for having your SDLC change calendar available is fantastic and then from that development and release perspective as you continue to train and build the skill sets of your teams making sure that you're following and staying current with best practices both with webinars that we offer and ServiceNow offers as well as spending time to research before building so one of the biggest things I see happening is that difference between Ken and should can I do this in ServiceNow technically yes you can do just about anything you want but should you do it is an entirely different question you know does the process make sense did we spend time thinking it through did we realize this you know new form maybe be used by multiple teams so it's that should to be deliberate and actually worked through some of those problems that you're solving technically it's really important and I think ultimately the goal is just to avoid repeating mistakes so that's really the key and so hopefully some of this guidance you know makes feels familiar I'm sure it's nice just to to hear it coming from us on some level as well all right Kate well I think I think we have a few questions that came in here that we can we can we can go through for a few more a few minutes here I think the first one that popped up here is how do I get started on a road map you know I we've talked about people that had a road map that wasn't was it consumed by the organization and but how do you get started on one in the first place right so I think the best way to do that is to go through that evaluation and assessment that we saw on our few first few slides to do that type of assessment that's something that can be handled in-house or again if you need some outside perspective or maybe some folks with deeper knowledge it's also we have programs like our upstream where we can come in we can support that as we did with gelled wind in that case I think it was really helpful because you know I think in their space that had a business process that was being handled differently by three different teams you know each team it's normal that they want to keep their way and so by reaching out to us we were able to come in and say here are the needs that everyone has to look at them together and then to make a recommendation that that can can help everyone right so to come up with a common solution that doesn't wind up just being maybe the loudest manager or you know the the team with the biggest budget if you will so I think upstream is a great way to do that to do that as assessment work very good thank you for that one this next question came in I've heard this many times over my ears and I think it will hit home for for some of the people on the phone besides the person that asked it you know we they said we've had several products rolled into service now those products had multiple admins in those individual products now there's only one taking care of the ServiceNow system it says I'm no expert in all areas of the or but how do we get over this huh I think I think maybe maybe there might be a little much a little too much to our workload on there and I've seen organizations do this before is is list let's just roll in that process area and that product into service now what's kind of dumping on the admin right you know back to the can versus should can you turn it on of course you can you know should you are you ready two different questions so in that space of you know consolidation of systems or consolidation of head count or admins yeah I think it's really easy to expect that that person will just know everything but I don't think that's the case so you know in my previous experience being a single-threaded admin in a customer space I know that having good communication within my team small thing but yielded huge results because I was able to say to my managers hey I need help you know I'm not a I don't have a specialization and event management for example not to say that I couldn't learn it or that anyone out there couldn't learn it over the years because I've been with the products about ten years now you know I certainly have learned it but that ramp up period especially if you've just done a phase one you know especially if you've got someone new or maybe you've had someone leave and you've got a new admin in that in that role is it is very important to make sure that they can say you know I need help or I need training or you know I need more hours in the day so if you're hearing things like that from a management perspective or if you're saying them from your perspective you can always consider options like DoD right so while you're learning while you're getting up to speed reaching out and having a dedicated team of people who can support you so DoD in our case this developer on-demand so it's the subscription of 50 hours a month for that extra help that you might need as a customer so how that gets used or how that gets spent there's a lot of different ways and so you know with the onshore staff that we have they're sometimes able to you know clean up a backlog that's maybe gotten a little a little heavy they're able to fill in if somebody needs a chance to have vacation because again you don't want to burn out your resources maybe they're the ones that have that deep knowledge or experience and a new of the platform that you haven't had exposure to yet or you haven't had training with yet so they can come in and do you know smaller projects and just pick that up allowing you to focus on the things that you do know or for example maybe you're great at writing you have an admin who's great at doing the business requirements but isn't strong from a coding background or an integrations background you know there it makes sense from a cost benefit in that case to continue to build up the person that you do have available to you internally and then reach out for help from a third party like have a stick you know okay the next question coming in here is kind of the the reverse of that it's my background requests have slowed down you know and I think I think it sounds like they're they're worried about getting better adoption within the company you know and the follow-up question with that is is how do i market to other teams how do I on board them to gain interest in you know to spark some additional interest yes right that is a pretty big 180 I guess I'm used to having people who see the product and get excited and just want to run with it but you're right there can be situations where you know maybe it's not because there's not much movement or interest and I think that ties back to you know personalities and skill sets if you've got someone who's a phenomenal developer they may not be the guy out on the street you know pitching it to other people but that's just as much part of the program that we were talking about so in that program space the communication space this is where you can really do some nice hi I like to this system so is really planning in your roadmap to do an upgrade out of the upgrade you might want to do kind of a show-and-tell of the new features that are going to be coming out so you could do some brown bag sessions you could do a little marketing one-pagers about you know coming soon we've got new capabilities or if you were going between different versions of service now when the UI had some significant changes talking about the new look and feel of maybe service portal maybe you're enabling more access on mobile phones and tablets or devices you could do some specialty sessions on that you could reach out to teams and engage them and bring them in for integrations with everything from page or duty to on-call schedules or you can look at some of maybe your existing process so if you've got you know new hire onboarding terminations you may find that there are other business units who are doing activities within those flows who could be brought in so maybe instead of getting an email from the system they're ready to be receiving tasks so I think that's really important for me you know SharePoint form or I think Lotus Notes forms those are those are trigger words and that I hear that and I realize oh hey you know let's let's bring it into the fold so keeping an ear out for some of those things I think is really important as well and then within your catalog it's really easy this is one of my favorite you know quick and dirty items to make is having a new feature request or a request that goes to your ServiceNow team where maybe your end users can request time with an admin so making sure that you're available to them so they giving them that access to you maybe it's having it so they can request features from that space and of course if there's defects in the system you would want them to be submitting an incident record for that so getting them actively using it with you know on that note not to interrupt you there but but I'm just thinking you know that ServiceNow admin could go to other teams and offer that save got a request new feature for other other teams and try to grasp some more foothold that way too right Oh certainly I think that's a really big one using additional catalog items so certain teams get the same requests again and again and again so being able to have sort of structured or durable items that you can build for them to get them out of email and into the system I've seen a lot of engineers who really love that cuz it gives them an opportunity to be to track and show hey you know these are how many things I'm getting a week it's really hard to justify your work and show your workload when it lives in Outlook and then the other piece with that that I tend to find is very attractive is being able to make use of the knowledge base so different knowledge bases you know encouraging people to use knowledge base articles you know bring your documentation into the system have it live there use the same requests if you have how-to videos you know make a video link to it within within the knowledge base so a lot of those things that you can do just to get more utility out of the system that you already have is really fantastic very good thanks Thank You Kate I think that's all the time we have for questions today so you know we can we can quickly touch on a gel and I think I think you can see here that we helped them redo their system from from scratch and really come up with a consistent common approach into the ITIL processes we established re-established the core IT process on this our self platform and we set it up so it could be scalable for for everybody's use and and have functionality that can be rolled out of in a iterative manner mm-hmm and this case study is available on our web site for folks want to go find out a little bit more about it but we were quite proud of the work that we were able to achieve in a relatively short time frame there and they had told us that partnering with Cova stick has helped us improve our business and the most important outcome is that now the jeld-wen IT team has the expertise to continue with future phases so now they're really ready to move forward and there was a lot of excitement as we were wrapping up that project very good okay and you know I want to thank everybody for joining us today and everybody's busy but you know we're trying to provide some some feedback into into the community here with with webinars at ebooks these these can be found underneath resources of slash library on our website and then here's a way to contact us service now cabeza comm you could you can like this on linkedin and follow us on twitter and watch your updates out there as well thank you it looks like we're out of time for today and we appreciate everybody joining and look forward to seeing you guys on the next one thank you