Transcript

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Howdy. And welcome to Creator Con. I'm here to share with you how to avoid creating skipped records. My name is Kim Reverman. I am the ServiceNow architect for Texas A&M University. We are a multi-tenant instance with multiple universities, colleges, departments, and agencies. We have over 1,000 ITIL users and a user base of over 400,000 users. With this configuration comes a significant number of customizations and, of course, skipped records. So I'm here to tell you and share with you what we did to avoid creating skipped records. One of the things that we were challenged with was reduce the upgrade duration time and increase time spent on improvements. And I'm going to show you we have. Here's some background about us whenever we first started. You can see there was a sharp rise in the duration time to actually getting an upgrade delivered from when we first started our clone to whenever we put it on production. And it took us up to three months for several of the upgrades. And now whenever we're deploying a major upgrade, it's taking us less than a month. One of the things too is our customizations were also rising. And we noticed we have a huge technical debt because of running a multi-instance. We adopted a strategy for getting back to baseline. And we've been still implementing new products since then and keeping our skipped records low. During the London upgrade, we leveraged the really sweet ServiceNow upgrade feature to only review the skipped records that were actually changed. That saved us a tremendous amount of time there so thank you, ServiceNow upgrade developers, for that feature. We really appreciate it. Getting back to baseline or as close as you can still isn't enough. How do you keep it there? And that was our challenge. Here's what we did to stabilize the growth of creating the skipped records. We made the ServiceNow records stand out using Field Styles. Using field styles, we were able to color the ServiceNow records with a green background. And if they happened to be modified by us, then they're priority one or two, then we're going to put a red border around them. The priority three and fours we have a dotted orange border, and the priority five a solid green border. Anything else created by us is left white background with a black text. Now the script that we use to control which of those styles we're going to show is called CreatedByNow. And I'm going to give you a demo of what you will see if you installed this script on your instances. This is Problem Management. It's the Configure All section. And as you can see, here are the business rules. All the records you see with the green background are ServiceNow records. The ones with the white ones are ours. And the ones that the very bottom there with the red dotted border is the ServiceNow record that we modified, a.k.a that's a skipped record. Here are the client scripts again. We have some that we've modified, and some that we have not, and others that we have created. And one of the things that's real nice about these is when we are looking for problems, we can easily see, OK, well, let's take a look at our modifications that we made, the things that we created first, or what did we modify and take a look and see if we need to make some changes there before we modify something else. This is the dictionary entries. As you can see, they have the green border around them because those are priority fives. So what does the script do? Well, first thing that we're going to check for is to see if the record is in our scoped app. If it is, it's ours. The background will remain white. Then the next thing we do is we look at the versions, just one record, to see if there is a sys update history record and see if it's current. If it is, it's NOW's and therefore it's going to remain green. If it's not current, it's NOW and we revised it. Any other version records is ours. Those are all going to be system updates set records. Since I didn't show you the script and you're probably curious about what you can do to get it, go out to SHARE. It's in the developer site for ServiceNow. And link for CreatedByNow or scan the QR code here to download it as soon as you can and install it. If you want to contact me, my information is here. I'm also available on the ServiceNow Devs Slack website community, an awesome place for getting help at any time. Thank you all very much for coming to Creator Con. Enjoy and be inspired to do great things. Thank you very much. [MUSIC PLAYING]