hello and welcome to another episode of uh inside the barrel pints this time we're going to revisit another topic we talked about previously playbooks and uh some where's our sound effects so uh great sound effect okay [Laughter] so yeah so dorian's going to tell us about the common playbook activities is that what we're talking about yeah yeah i think we'll we'll kind of go over some basics if uh you've never used playbook or you're just getting started with playbook some of the the gotchas that you may run into or kind of you know jumpstart your your development in that space okay perfect um and for those that don't know anything about playbooks you know playbooks is kind of servicenow's new way to handle cross-department processes so if you have a process that may have multiple different types of fulfillers or may cross multiple teams or even just a complex process that you need to follow exact steps for maybe compliance or something like that uh you know playbooks are a really good way to to handle that um yeah it's built off of uh you know like the underlying architecture is built off of flow designer so a lot of it you know runs through things in flow and starts and stops between those things so perfect perfect let's jump right in so i have a few different screens on here um where i think i i did some you know oven work behind the scene just to uh to keep us up to speed um but essentially i love the magic oven what i did is for this demo i just set up a trigger on the incident table very simple um we went through that in our last uh demo and this is kind of the screen you get to once you've gone through all of the screens on when something is done with the trigger you've named it and you've said like the the trigger is like a record create and so what what i want to kind of talk about first is lanes so lanes are the the things that when you uh that are kind of like the stages that something may go through and elaine may have multiple activities so in this case a lane may be like intake it's probably the most common one there's something that happens or there's work that you do when information or is coming in there's probably another lane that's normally like assess right so this is like you're checking data on something you're maybe actually like working on the ticket um and then there's probably at like at your core like some sort of resolve right so there's some sort of like now you're in the final stages of it you're closing things out you're sending notifications and if you if you don't know where to start with lanes i would probably just tell people to start with these three um there's maybe a fourth um in there maybe for like a work in progress or something like that but you know keeping it simple is kind of really the way to the way you want to go and uh the a note about this is a playbook won't actually show up unless you actually have an activity inside of the lane so even if you activated this like it's and you created an incident it's not actually gonna show up you really actually need at least an activity um in each of these lanes and so the activities that i think are you're definitely going to run into is instructions so instruction is very simple what what this will do is this will just show up so i normally like to start with an instruction before you get it you jump into things and this can be you know like review this playbook you know this playbook contains a process for x y for incidents i would have been fine with xyz yeah yeah i thought i'd add a little bit more so that's kind of your your first one so you'll definitely use instructions especially if you're about to go through a bunch of complex things instructions is normally a really good one and then pretty much after that uh user form is probably like the de facto standard if so normally back you know back in the day before playbooks you would essentially have your your incident page right where you would you know review like all the fields on there user form is like that replication where you can do like bite sizes of information so let's say on the intake you had some sort of like review contact information um and uh essentially the the table you select in our case is is incident um and development instances run slow so this tables well while it's searching let me ask you a question is and i don't remember if we covered this before but playbooks are not or are playbooks part of servicenow core like are they they're they're not going to be an extra fee or anything like that these are part of what you're going to get with like your basic itsm implementation correct okay yeah it is part of the core you don't have to the you would potentially have to pay a fee if you wanted to do um like playbooks on custom tables so there is like the app engine side of this that you want to do it on any table but any of your core tables um any of your core task tables uh this should be included perfect because you know as you were talking about with incidents i was thinking in my head i'm like man this would make you know for your internal help desk team this really does uh make the flow so much better you know totally totally and and there's i'll actually show the service now shipped out like an incident response demo will show at the end perfect um where they they go through a bunch of different activities so incident record right so so the basic setup you want to review contact information rather than overwhelming the agent with um all of the fields that they they need what you can do is you select the view so either the default view or maybe your workspace the views that already are created then you just put in the name of the the field and and and that's really it for for user form and and so we'll we'll actually test this out to kind of oh so okay so that means that it doesn't like you know from a portal point of view stuff i work on all the time if you define you know if you say hey use this view that view is what defines what field show and all that but you can actually just use a view and then tell it only these fields show up exactly exactly and so in san diego they have this playbook preview which is really nice now that you can kind of continuously preview your kind of similar to your your flow if you wanted to test your flow and it'll probably take a little bit to run but notice notice remember how i said lanes don't show up unless they have activities so right right don't show up right so here is that instructional one you know review this playbook you can you know skip it or mark as complete there is some functionality where you can restart that as well so let's say you wanted to go back and restart um and if this did work if i did everything right it should have shown here with just my field so obviously there is something that i'm interesting here but let's see if i can you know quickly figure that out so incident it's on this one i feel like the works the form view workspace would have worked um no try just try deeper oh it's it's probably called id [Laughter] so what oh working at a memory yeah yeah um you know it's okay we'll just run the the playbook again and what's kind of cool is on a given incident you may have multiple playbooks you don't need all of your playbooks to be super complex they can trigger at like different times in a process that um that would kind of uh work right so in this case like i imagine you had one playbook for you know you know some part of the the process you can then say when it gets to this state go trigger a different playbook and keep your playbooks bite size yeah so in this case we we're jumping into it and this one should show my field and so here you go right and what's what's nice about this is um one you can update a record right so this is essentially just clicking the update button inside of um uh inside the platform or you can mark as complete which also updates and then moves on the the the nice part about this is if you had ui policies related to this field it will also work here so like there there could be a case where that when the caller is empty you know don't show anything but maybe when you fill in the caller have some fields show up at as well and that's where sure so yeah that's so that's the user form one probably the most common one because that means you can have you know we could add another activity here for user form that maybe after contact details you want to you know review assignment group right so it's it's very like small bite-sized things rather than seeing a complicated um display form yeah yeah no you know it's as an end user myself i don't like huge forms and um you know i want to see what's just specific to what i'm doing right and then you know i can see it from a help desk person's point of view same thing you know instead of having the entire form show up you got to scroll from the top to the bottom to just add some notes yada yada you know it'd be very easy to set it up as a playbook and have specific pieces uh consumable by that help desk technician yeah and sometimes right like especially if you have like ui policies on on change stuff or client scripts on change if you're just having it all on one form they may enter information in different times and then it like not actually give the end result that you're expecting so the i would say that the the last server not the last one the second last one that i think is really common is this checklist task so it could be the case that it's not a bunch of fields that you have but you have like just a checklist of things you need to do maybe in another system sure so what you can do is a checklist task it's like you know incident checklist yeah like you know if if you don't have an integration set up and you you're making an order or you know you got to send a packing label out or something like that for a return that checklist would be nice you know contact third party vendor and then do that and you know yeah and so i'm going to select the one that is already exists from this demo but i'll actually show where you can create these checklists because it's actually not intuitive there's no like create if you wanted to create one what's nice about this is by default and i'll show when i save this by default the [Music] advanced properties here this is normally if if it doesn't have like a checklist like if you don't select the task that you want this like maybe the current task for example it's going to default creating a task and putting a checklist on it and so that you have to be careful here because of permissions right like not everyone has access to the task field right right into an issue or it doesn't so what you could do is just make it the incident right and the incident table but be careful if if you did this then it's going to create a new incident and put a checklist on it right um and so that's where this inputs comes in right so what task do you want this to be on this is where you would you know potentially put it on the trigger task so this is does it put it just puts it into a description or the notes no like task or the checklist is a an activity formatter um so it's it's like a special you know field so let's go ahead and test this again on our same record so that it'll show up here pretty shortly and so the actual field um let's see or sorry where did where to create the checklist let me go pull that up as well um because i i think that's that one took me a while to find yeah perfect so so where where you get that is under the checklist underscore table um and for example like this is the the checklist and so this is kind of not the best interface but what you can do is once you create one right you can you know copy it along the others and really the the big one here is this items you know and you know it's going to have a checklist of you know thank you for your patience has your issue been resolved is there anything else that's what you should see in um in our playbook preview so when we go here notice assess now shows up right because we put an action under it and we're gonna show what skip looks like it's totally fine hopefully it's going to show there we go come on pdi's are speedy right yeah and so you know here you go right here's the checklist it's going to be on the incident that we're testing right rather than creating a new one and you have checklists so and when all of those are complete it's going to be complete and and i would say that the last one which you know we don't need to go too much into is just the the send email right just a really really simple you can select who you want this to go to this will always go to the caller you can pre-fill this information and you can also pre-fill this right and we're going to save and close and i'm also going to do an instruction just to to show instruction and i can't spell but so and and the send email is is relatively straightforward i'll show that as well the reason i i put one other action there is i'm actually going to show how you can create an optional activity which okay shout out to lh um because she is doing a uh a lab at knowledge on this uh because it's not intuitive um and the docs don't really talk about it a lot but i'll show us show people how you can i can do it so sweet so we have this activity demo again so notice the resolve ones i'm just going to skip all of this to to move things along and on activities notice this is starting in sequential order like you could have it super flexible where only start with the previous start at the same time maybe start after this is what the the email one kind of looks like which is which is kind of cool um and you can you know send email and this will now you know send that email and and so what i wanted to show quickly is not every process has like a predefined thing like maybe we wanted to send an email on the intake right but maybe not every time you get an incident you want to send it so only certain sure so what servicenow designed was this notion of optional activities and so the confusing part here is you want to go to the sys pd process definition once you find your activity you can find the activity that you want to make optional so let's say i want to make the send email one optional what you do is you change this start rule to be manual so now it'll move move away from our our flow or our process now notice this is only manual for this lane so if you want it in every lane you have to remove this as well so it applies to every lane or if you only want to be able to do this optional activity inside this lane so for our case maybe we want it on every lane so send email is probably a really good one to have optional and what we're going to do is i'm just going to activate this but you you could you could add send email as a as one in in the resolve lane and still have the optional one available if you if you add if you have both of them correct you could okay so now now when i refresh this it'll actually move away you won't actually see it anymore so the interface isn't there and that's why it's a little confusing to to find [Music] but this way you essentially can have an optional activity notice it's not there anymore but if we test on our handy dandy number two and the reason you have like previous running ones won't actually you know get all of your changes so it always has to be like a new only going forward very similar to workflow like there's a contacts or flow um yeah and so let's say we've we've marked this one as complete and now notice there is a the three dots here that wasn't there before so these these dots aren't there and this one's going to have a add an activity and so now i can add an activity that says hey send an email so this is really useful if you have like a send email maybe escalate right if you need to escalate occasionally or maybe get an approval right to do something these are really good ones to you know potentially make optional and when you do this it essentially loads this loads this one inside of here so and it only applies to this specific playbook or this running instance of it so not everyone's going to have the send email but right one because you added it with right yeah um i think the last thing i would just want to show and we won't go into detail is let's say you wanted to add more buttons here like they have this notion of action activity so on the assist declarative action assignment so if if you went to a playbook playbook these actions here so if you want an action on a on a given playbook if you want an action on a given stage um within it so those lanes or if you want it on a given activity um what you do is you would create one and obviously use ones that already exist so like this one does assign to me um which you know if the record condition meets this then that action essentially shows up and in this case it's a server-side script so very simple just assign it to you so this is you you can make them server-side scripts you can reuse client ui actions so it's really really flexible but once you create your action assignment you then link it to the experience that it's related to so that's that's just like if you want it very specific to an activity versus if you want it always available on on a given playbook so in this case because this one is on the playbook it doesn't need to be act uh part of an activity uh definition it's essentially on the entire playbook and i'll show it where where that assigned to me is and this is what servicenow has as an example for the incident response demo and i'll kind of just talk a little bit about some of the things here and we can we could kind of sum it up so oh i meant to oh i meant to open that we'll run it twice and so you notice you know they kept it's pretty simple there's you know a couple lanes so they had four so identification which was similar to our intake logging which is similar to rss and they just had they separated out resolve enclosure so let me open that while we go through it and so you know they did a confirmed contact detail so right this is the record one this is some instructional this one's a list which is kind of cool if you wanted to show some related lists they they had an example of you know what fields to show for an incident and then there's actually some advanced properties here um to determine you know what what list of things to show so if you wanted to show similar ones for a given caller right they they essentially put the um the conditions in there and uh and yeah so this is this is just kind of a a small example uh and and so kind of you know what what that looks like here right is you know they you know bring that playbook here um the ad activity um they had an example of it with escalade incident and the actual it's not here but there's three dots where that should be here that's like assigned to me shows up um but i think it's because it's assigned to somebody i didn't actually look at the condition um that this won't it won't show up but so that kind of summarizes a lot of different things you can do with playbooks to kind of get started um you got your instructions you got your user forms you have your your lists and um you you have your your your actions that you can take on things um what do you what do you think john do you feel more confident being able to do playbooks now yeah no i i love it i think playbooks are really handy um and you know going back to that whole uh what's the word there uh thing that servicenow's doing as far as doing low code no code solutions you know you did almost everything without in fact you did everything without writing any code it was all configuration based it's it's very um powerful you know kind of like flow designer where you can do a lot of things um and and do it all without having to write uh serious code but you can back it up with code if needed right um yeah so that would be a little bit more like complex an action or an activity that does the code and then you show it on a given case or a situation so yeah yeah um but what is nice is this is definitely unlocks your like citizen developer right that you know if you wanted to enable other people to create these processes you they have like a playground to do it yeah and you know with you saying that it kind of makes me think you know so way back when when i was a lot younger i used to build exercise equipment and uh so i i worked on a a conveyor line right you know you you had the exercise equipment start at the beginning which was nothing and then it would get built along the line and a lot of times the people at each station would define their own processes after a certain amount of time because you know doing repetitive actions you really have a lot of time to think and figure out the best way to do what you're doing and so when you say you know the citizen developer it really allows like you know help desk to say you know what i want to define my process better because i think the way we're currently doing it is not efficient we're wasting time doing this and that where we don't need to and and it allows the user to really um make their process their own and and and they can experiment with it you know like oh let's change this no that didn't work that added more complications and so it's just it's it's a very powerful way to empower uh the end user or the the person using that right it's not you're not stuck being defined by someone that you know that's just like oh well this is how it's gotta be you have to follow this every time and it's like no look i do this every day i've got some ideas let's let's work them through and see how well they work out you know so i think i think that's that's a great benefit there yeah and i think there's there's even power to once you've done a playbook and you can now analyze you know are like there's there's probably metrics that you can start tying to like how effective things are actually being filled out or completed yeah things are getting stuck in the process so i definitely think there's you know i i still really believe that playbook is like really the future of you know any kind of agent experience or it's it's going to be a core part so i'm really excited to constantly see it grow yeah yeah for sure i i agree completely with that cool all right well we wanted to keep this short i was i'm under the 30 minute mark but hopefully this is helpful yes for sure cool so we'll give ourselves a little clap and and next week where john and i are going to talk about knowledge so if you are going knowledge john i are going to tell you kind of which agendas we think are going to be super interesting going to kind of explore it so it'll be a little less technical on the next one and more just cool things that we think you guys should check out at knowledge so yeah and you should stop by the cast desk or whatever booth we have oh that's in two weeks yeah but you should stop by if you're going to uh new york just in two weeks yeah new york isn't two weeks yet yeah and uh you should stop by because we may be broadcasting you know we may have a person on the floor uh as part of our our stream john john will give you free stuff you know that's well i'll tell them to give you free stuff yeah yeah cool all right well thanks yeah we'll see you guys [Music]