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Customization calamity: Mistakes to avoid when extending OOB apps
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Accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder
CCB1138-K22
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody. I'm Paul Morris. And today, I'm excited to talk to you about how you can accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. And I will also be sharing some of my tips and tricks for success with Catalog Builder. Now, I've been working on the ServiceNow platform for over 10 years. And typically, once a service catalog goes live, everyone is falling over each other to get their catalog items added to the service catalog. And us poor ServiceNow admins and developers, we can't get them in fast enough for the customer. No matter how quickly we try and get them in, it's never fast enough. You'll never find someone that wishes their cadence of catalog development was slower. Everyone wants more items in faster and better. So ServiceNow has a tool called Catalog Builder that's been sitting in every ServiceNow instance for quite some time that's just waiting to be used to help you guys accelerate catalog development. So what catalog development typically looks like. You've got a business owner, and they go out and gather catalog requirements to build a catalog item, which then gets put on the self-service portal. Traditionally, what happens, the business owner or someone on behalf of the business owner I gather there's those requirements. They give it to a ServiceNow administrator or a developer, and then they wait weeks or months. And eventually, they'll get a catalog item, their catalog item on the self-service portal. But that's just not quick enough in this day and age where everyone's working from home, and they want to be able to request things on the service portal. So here comes the Catalog Builder. So first, the catalog admin comes in and creates a template for the business group. And then the business owner, as they already are doing, they gather catalog requirements. But now with Catalog Builder, the business owner has empowered themselves to create the catalog item themselves rather than waiting for an admin or a developer to do it. They can even preview that catalog item in multiple channels after they create it to get that immediate feedback, and then take it through a pre-published flow, and then publish it to the catalog. This is done through a new user interface, which is a user-centric design wizard that takes the user step by step through what they need to do to complete a catalog item. It comes with a drag and drop form designer, which not even the ServiceNow admins get. And as I mentioned previously, they can preview what the form would look like in various channels. And best of all is they don't need to have a ServiceNow admin account to be able to do this. So is it a good idea to be giving every single business owner access to Catalog Builder to start building catalog items? Well, we want to pick who our builders will be quite wisely. Someone who understands the organization's fulfillment process. At the end of the day, they're not just building a form. They're also building the fulfillment process that comes after that form is built. We want someone that's going to be building the right items, not just what they personally want, really need to take into consideration what the business strategy is to make sure that the right items get built. Someone that has a sound understanding of process and a good understanding of ServiceNow so they can roll with the terminologies that are in Catalog Builder. They need to be motivated to build the items, because most likely they're busy and they've got another day job that they're doing. And they have the capacity to build those items. You're not going to be able to accelerate the development of catalog items if you've got a Catalog Builder that wants to build all these items for their particular business area, but they don't have the time to do it. So it's important to choose your builder wisely. So once you've chosen your builder, they're now going to be building catalog items instead of your ServiceNow admin that has a lot of experience and was probably doing a pretty good job. So how do we make sure that our new Catalog Builder is doing a good job? We create design standards. We need to first define what a good item looks like, put it in a document, and all agree that's what a good item looks like. So we can give it to our Catalog Builder, and they know the correct language to use. They know how to present the form properly, doing it in the same way every time. So you've got a catalog that is consistent across all your different items. We define the roles and responsibilities around the service catalog as well. It's one thing having standards. But if number one is making sure those standards are met, they're not going to be very helpful. So you want to make someone accountable for making sure that these standards are met within this service catalog and noting down what all the catalog rules are so everyone can work together. You may also wish to define what the Catalog Builder can and cannot do. The catalog Builder unlocks around 80% of the functionality in a service catalog. But the other 20% still needs to be done by an admin. So you want some sort of process on how to handle those edge cases if you want to design an item outside of what Catalog Builder would let you do. So without that design standards, you might get items of varied quantity, quality, and that's going to stop you from accelerating. So it's important to stop and have those design standards. So once you've got them, you can accelerate forward and increase your cadence on your catalog development. So it's not just about the Catalog Builder. The catalog Builder has access to this great tool. But there's a lot of other people that are involved in the entire process of managing a service catalog. So it's important that everyone works together. This includes other roles like the ServiceNow administrator, a catalog admin, and even the fulfillment team that are actually processing the items once they've been logged by end users. It's important to leverage the expertise of others, especially if you're a new Catalog Builder. Your ServiceNow admin already has years of design experience building this catalog items. So it's wise to leverage that experience. And let's not forget the domain knowledge of the facilities who are actually completing the requests. You need to talk to them and make sure that you're representing the correct process in your catalog item. So when the fulfillment team run through the process, it makes sense and it's correct. So we're working as a team, creating all these catalog items. But when it comes to building these forms, how can we accelerate the creation of these forms in Catalog Builder? One of my key tips for doing that is using question sets. So what is a question set? It's a set of predefined questions that you can just plunk on to the drag and drop form builder that might have a number of questions already set out for you to reuse across as many items as you want. So that saves a lot of time, so you're not constantly rebuilding the same form over and over again. And it also helps you standardize what these forms look like. Now, question sets can only be created by ServiceNow developers or possibly your catalog admin. As I mentioned in the third tip, you really all need to be working together and communicating to accelerate and push forward with your catalog development using Catalog Builder. So speaking of building these catalog items, where should we be building them? Should we be building them in straight into production? Do we need to test? It's a good idea to follow whatever your existing development lifecycle process is in ServiceNow. I know the key word there, development lifecycle, but development does include testing. Testing is still quite important. Yes, in Catalog Builder, you can preview what the form looks like straight away. But you can't test the workflow behind that without first publishing it, which then puts it on the service catalog for people to order from. And do you really want to be doing that in production? Probably not. As you're building questions on your forms, Catalog Builder lets you create dynamic behaviors to show questions and hide questions based on certain things, though the way those questions react to behaviors might be different in the Service portal to how it does in the agent user interface. So you really need to test it there as well. And again, you don't really want to be testing in production. The process behind the form, the fulfillment team are actually processing that needs to be validated end to end. So it is just best practice as you would with typical ServiceNow enhancements to migrate those changes through the environments from dev, test, and production. And that's actually a best practice today. Yes, you can build them straight into production technically. But just because you can, doesn't mean that you necessarily should. And your developer needs to be aware that there are some technical challenges around deploying updates with Catalog Builder. But you can read up on some of those in my ServiceNow blogs. So tip number 5 there, follow your development lifecycle process. So summarizing my top five tips. We choose our builder wisely. Once we've chosen our builder, we make sure that they have design standards before they start pumping out catalog items. Make sure they continue to work as a team, and don't work in isolation. Work with catalog admins, work with ServiceNow admins. You're leveraging question sets, so you can build those forms quicker and get more catalog items out. And you're following your development life cycle process, which is in the long term is going to get you more throughput of catalog items, because you're more likely to get them right the first time. Now, Catalog Builder has been around since Quebec. So if you're looking to speed up the development of your service catalog, leverage these tips and tricks that I've shared with you today, and begin your journey accelerating the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. Now, I'd like to thank everyone for watching this video today. If you want to get in contact with me, you can find me by email, LinkedIn, one of my favorite hangouts, Sndevs Slack. If you want to know or see more of my ServiceNow content, you can read my ServiceKnow-How blogs. And if you want to know more about, Kinetic IT, the company I work for, you can visit their website. Thanks, everyone, for listening or watching. And hope you have a great digital knowledge experience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Customization calamity: Mistakes to avoid when extending OOB apps
CCB1094
<p>To customize or not to customize? This age-old developer dilemma intensifies when tailoring applications to client needs. While some apps flexibly extend, others prove more rigid, demanding intricate customisations. Yet, not all customizations are created equal nor are they inherently negative. Plunge into this session to discover smart tactics on the art of seamless extension versus astute customization. Absorb wisdom on navigating the ripple effects of future upgrades, shared by a three-time ServiceNow<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="">®</span></span> Developer MVP with over ten years of experience on the platform.</p>