this episode is brought to you by oscar technology look if you ask the duke oscar technology brings two distinct advantages to the servicenow ecosystem first their expert staffers specialize in a single tech and a single region so you can be sure you have somebody who's intimately aware of your tech needs and the local ecosystem second their servicenow recruiters must pass the certified servicenow system admin exam talk about putting your money where your mouth is on expertise reach out to louis beck or kayla rosetta for all your servicenow staffing needs their contact information is in the description below hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is so good to have you here today we're discussing a strategy for uncomfortable situations you may have when consulting a friend recently described a situation where tensions were escalating at a client site the specifics of these scenarios will vary but in this case he wanted good sample data before he started developing so we wanted to clone prod over test and dev both of which were out of box at the time the customer for whatever reason and perhaps they were good ones didn't want this to happen this resulted in a stalemate with increasing tensions now the way i see it the problem isn't that the consultant is right and the customer's resource is wrong or even the other way around the problem is in the framing of the disagreement it's not between the customer and the consultant you see in matters of advice the consulting architect can only point the way they aren't the decision maker nor are they a long-term stakeholder so if you frame it as you versus them you stand to lose the only skin you have in the game your reputation the savvy consultant will take the scenario and frame it as the interest of the customer resource versus the interest of the customer resource in our example the consultant should say something like okay mr customer you have two competing interests to do adequate testing for a great rollout we need good demo data but we understand you feel the clone down from prod is risky which is riskier your concerns about the clone down or deploying an app not adequately tested in this way you avoid the near guaranteed pride based conflict escalation and empower the customer's resource to be the hero of the story you provide them two paths that they will take ownership of neither of which ends in a conflict with you frame in matters of advice it's always the customer's interests versus the customers interests if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching you