wednesday and today and what it takes to really extend your servicenow teams we've heard this over and over from clients trying to find servicenow staff trying to retain that servicenow staff and trying to stay ahead of this growing backlog is is almost an overwhelming challenge so today i'm joined by two others from third era and so let me unpin my camera third aaron happy to be here with you trying eric excellent and eric welcome back troy good to be back thank you very much for having me eric markey i work with our clients up here in uh new england um kind of becoming uh ever-growing backlog and as you do continue to publium compounds and and eric i think we've done a very good job of you know talent attracting talent being able to to bring that in um and at the same time we can recognize people area uh desire to grow customers don't always have that room and by focusing in on which of those areas that are needed it's much easier to um you know work with our customers to set expectations as well as make sure that we're putting together the the right team to provide that service to the customer package right but at the same time you know we can adapt and flex it you know based on what the clients need is that yep they've got a team that's really good at just taking user stories and implementing them at the same time it's those same clients that are saying i end up with this technology debt how did i get here [Music] one of the things that i've seen in the the projects that i have and as i've talked with different clients are using our managed service capabilities is as third era we've while we do implement then we use service now to track that which i think is just kind of cool um i've i've seen our teams push back some john can can you talk a little bit more about how while we do implement those user stories efficiently and effectively there is some push back we want to be that advice and counsel and say we could do that but yeah exactly i think um you know my my mantra on any of the these services is to to treat the instance as if it's your own and and really have that mindset uh coming into doing any work for for any customer um you know we're building long-term relationships here we don't want to you know be the ones causing causing a problem uh long term and we also want to get things healthier so it's it's working better for the customer and it's easy easier for for us to manage and maintain and one of the ways that we're able to do that is um you know the uh level of experience and and length of experience that that our resources have the um kind of depth and breadth that they have across the platform and the amount of services that we're providing for for all of our customers across every industry industry we're able to quickly learn and adapt share best practices internally and get that out to everybody and at the same time making sure that our our services are provided from uh from a best practice perspective that the value comes from being able to tell customers the things that they don't even know that they should be asking right and and telling them where they're deviating from best practices and i'll tell you that the best practices change over time as well so what was true five years ago may not be true today and and you need to keep up with that and um you know really have a customer service mentality to to all of this rather than a developer mentality the pace of change is accelerating for sure maybe more from a tactical standpoint here but you know we tend to see clients that you know we bring them into uh our run service and they may have teams that have been you know any you know enhancing maintaining administering the platform but they're doing it on on a broken platform quite frankly um you know like i think to your point john you know um early on you know there was a series of decisions made around how they're gonna structure their cmdb whether or not that was really aligned to csdm um you know custom considerations or custom things that were built on the platform they've continued to kind of build and layer and layer on top of that right um and you know i think what we what we tend to find is that we get into some of these accounts and you know we run our proprietary tool that instant analyzer that we have which is what i think the first or the second most downloaded you know app on the servicenow app store but we tend to find and uncover a lot of issues that clients don't necessarily know are there i mean can you elaborate on that a little bit more i think i'm seeing that across my clients but you see kind of more depth of breath than i do yeah absolutely we have a number of clients where where that is absolutely helped um you know being a being a free tool it's it's something that's quick easy to install and gets really good results and the the the difference from um you know maybe some of the other uh health scanning tools that are out there is it doesn't just tell you uh what may be wrong or what may might not align to best practice but it also tells you what's the impact of that and and you know how how and where is that used throughout there to help prioritize that and so what we've done is be able to leverage that to um you know not not build a backlog but really build a um you know a get healthy plan on the platform that we can use that that data and information to um really provide that information to the customer to help prioritize with them you know which issues to tackle when why we're doing them and what the progress is because that that scan can then you know be run over and over to actually see that the trend of improvement over time one of the things i'll do is i'll go back in in the comments for on on youtube linkedin is is add that link to that instance analyzer and for any of those that are watching this or listening to this it is available on the servicenow store just search for instance analyzer if you have any questions or concerns reach out to me or your local third era account exec we're glad to help you kind of understand how best to get that installed and running in a non-production environment then also glad to sit down and pull in one of our experts to really read through that with you so you understand what is this tool telling you how to help prioritize because one of the things that i'll say is i've seen clients do this we run it and like i got this laundry list of errors do i need to fix all of these and john maybe you can add into some of that too because we've seen that as we go through that kind of you know free read back here's here's what this means yes those are indeed you know not best practices but these are the things to address right yeah there's definitely a difference between um issues and recommendations right so um issues kind of high priority things um things that may have security impact or upgradeability impact those are the things that we would prioritize first other things um you know they may not necessarily follow best practice but a lot of times there was business justification behind that um and and that's part of the conversation of not just what is this but where is it being used why was it done and it we're allowed to kind of mark those items and filter those out and and so the first run you know may look very different than the second run even with no configurations made it it's got that analysis to you know say that this is what we really found and what we're going to be tackling and and let's use that baseline going forward it's it takes a lot to dive into that and understand how to prioritize it it's it's i think it's an amazing tool but you know i've seen that you know shock come back like what um but there are some some good recommendations but you know once i think clients understand how to read it there's some great ways to really catch some things early on um you know i've seen several put that in as just part of their their normal process before they're pushing things you know forward in in their promotion sequence to just kind of validate make sure it's it wasn't deep coded well you know and i think it provides a good try i think it provides a good starting point to make sure that you know we can help to validate you know the health of their system right and then you know work to remediate that and many times that tends to be kind of a starting point you know for you know things that we're adding to the backlog and grooming and prioritizing right and it can be broken up um to two different areas too so if you wanted to focus in on your internal development team and those developers you can filter down to that if you want to look at um you know only a particular application maybe you're only interested in the scoped hr service delivery uh application you can set the filters to really scan and bring back the results on subsets of things as well too so you can kind of break apart and prioritize that way as well nice you know i find that you know when i sit and look at our you know operational run services our managed services here that are the structure of the service really i think is is kind of differentiated from what we're seeing you know out in the market today um i think this touches upon you know what you had mentioned earlier just our ability to be able to source and attract you know some of the best talent in the world for that matter we are a global organization right um and um you know i think because of that i think you know we're able to bring a lot of unique talent you know that has specialized skill sets both on service now in industry you know across all the areas of the platform you know and i just get maybe like to get your thoughts um john and troy about you know kind of what do you think in terms of how do you think that makes us a little bit more unique than some of what the other offerings are on the market all right john take this one first or do you want me to okay yeah john yeah when we start um so uh just just thinking through that for for a second um we have two two different ways that the services can be structured and one of those is a a subscription model that that allows you full access to um all of our teams so so all uh what are we up to 600 633 or so employees right now um you you have access to all of that but we're still working with you to identify um what it what is your typical month-to-month week to week type use going to be and aligning a team to that while allowing for the flexibility for those cases where you know next month we uh know that we want to be looking at a a strategic roadmap for um the uh service portfolio management and and apm suites um not necessarily a skill set that that we're using on a week-to-week basis let's plan ahead bring in an expert in that space you know bring them in temporarily for a couple of weeks work with you on that and then that that person can disengage gauge again and go back to um your your standard uh backlog development or or support um type services without needing to change anything in the contracts or go through all of that so um you've got your your service that you're doing regularly with the flexibility to access and tap into the the full depth and breadth of of thirdera i agree and i'll poke a little bit at that john um you know in in some of the past partners that that i've worked for and some of the past partners that i've seen or other partners in the eos system that i've seen it's it's kind of like they look back and say see my bench you can pull any of them ours is structured a little bit differently um in and we have a service delivery manager that is is assigned to that client assigned to really understand their needs and balance it out and some of that's free and if there's more there that's that's part of the use of the contract for them to really do that planning but tell us more about that that pod structure and why that matters so it's not just the same way it's like well yeah you can reach into the bench wherever we're reaching into our bench we're reaching into the depth but i think it's it's uniquely different how that's done yeah the the um even the uh standard team that that's aligned to you they're aligned in as you mentioned uh a pod and so what that means is you know you're not just getting one business analyst one technical consultant you know maybe one senior technical consultant in that service delivery manager what you're getting is alignment to each of those as roles uh with a a small number of people behind that we obviously have more but we want to get a um you know a small group of people for for the technical side you know maybe that's up to six people that have access to your instance that know your business that know your environment um that can you know work to spread the load of the work across cover you know backups outed their pto or other outages things like that you know without um introducing any of that weight back to the customer to to manage that we're managing that without um you know needing to restaff somebody every time something changes because we have those small pods aligned to each of the roles right i think that's tremendously powerful yeah i think uh you know looking at time you know one of the things that i look at with with our managed services is is really how to get engaged you know and and you know i i've got my own two cents but like to let you guys kind of chime in as well when you've seen new clients kind of come to us and and maybe they start off with a knowledge of what they had in a managed service in the past what are some good ways that you've seen clients kind of go the light bulb turns on right the the mind blown oh this this is different this is not the managed service that i saw before what are some of those things that you've seen clients go through and really see that this is not what they expected in a good way yeah so um really starting any discussion around this looking at the entire platform what are all of the things that need to be done and um if it was on on paper or whiteboard you could almost start to highlight all of those things what we've done with with those those different knobs as you called them of you know our support enhancement and manage offering is you know kind of pre-packaged what we think the most common options are for that so you know if you're needing uh administration requests incident support um you know somebody doing uh clone downs of the instance things like that that aligns to something like support if what you're needing is kind of that that csi enhancement for applications that you've already deployed that that's enhanced if you're needing somebody to take over all of that that that's managed um and just breaking it down like that and really uh taking a zoom out to to see the macro level of everything that it takes often turns a light bulb off off for light bulb on in our customers right to think about the big picture and think about where is it that they really need help so that we can focus in and and provide service in the right way you know from my perspective joy i think um really it's been uh advising guidance you know that we're able to provide to our clients you know especially clients already have servicenow teams and i think that's we tend to get you know um really good feedback from our clients in terms of you know we never got this before typically you know we've always gotten a staff log model we're just kind of throwing people at it you know third hour of these you know has skin in the game you know will help to advise on best practices guide us along the way help us to prioritize you know the work that needs to be done so that we're focused on the right things and i think um you know if i had to pick anything in terms of how we're different from some of the other services i'd say that's right at the top cool right and i think to kind of lay down the challenge or at least some creative thinking if you're watching this you're looking at how to to really get out from underneath this growing backlog or let's you know let's say you're you've got open rex for several people in servicenow and you're looking for some way to backfill it we've we've seen clients leverage this run to be able to backfill one or many roles where we can step in and help and sometimes that's that's a new way for you to fulfill that capability sometimes it's to help in that transition um but what i'll say is is it you can look at your servicenow instance and you can come up with you know kind of three months backlog without much thinking and most clients i talk to that's that's really easy it's like yeah i can find three months of work i just wish i could get to reach out to one of us you know we're easy to find online um and just ask i've got three months what can you do for me with our managed service i think we've got a great way for you to try it out three months back log and let's get you out from underneath that and give you a chance to experience the third era effect closing shots john or eric yeah so thanks troy that this has been fun thing thanks for inviting me on here to be back in the future but um you know as you said if if there is any challenge that that you're having today you know finding bringing in talent um managing maintaining that backlog um you know really anything managing the platform even if you don't know whether you need a managed service or professional services or anything you know reach out to us we're happy to have that conversation and guide you down the right path to to figure out you know how we get the outcomes that you're looking for i got that john i think that's a good way to end our our conversation today troy i appreciate you having me on and being able to talk about this a little bit and maybe hopefully help to educate some of the uh some of the folks that are listening today so appreciate the time being on now with troy i appreciate it you know part of it is as i do this as part of third era is is really there's so many things happening in the business world they're really transforming the way we think about business and where uh what that transformation looks like we're here to help with that the other part is is as we kind of talked about a little bit here today is servicenow is continues to grow at in increasing pace of change trying to stay ahead of that is tough one of the things that you know three of us have enjoyed being part of third era is we do have depth across that platform and for us let's build a fun to reach back i've had to change my language because they used to say if you know me anyone that says i know all of servicenow run the other way although i think chuck tomasi probably knows all of it but for the most part you know that that has been the case right um but but the depth we bring in with our managed services that you have access to john that you can provide to our clients they get to reach into that broad expertise and see that kind of advice and counsel if you change this we really need to think about how you're using this over here right cool any any other last parts before we close it down for the day now appreciate the time today troy good enough thank you gentlemen thanks everyone and let me wait for a little bit of lag and then we will turn these