all right welcome to another episode of glide chat my name is michael lombardo ceo of glidefast consulting and with me i have mark smiley director of advisory services at glyfest hey mark how you doing doing well it's good to be here how are you doing hey enjoying life absolutely to the fullest so mark you and i have known each other for a long time before glidefest i recall at least two projects we worked on while we were at different companies and uh man it was a pleasure working with you yeah we had a lot of fun we put our we put our super powers together and come out with some great solutions for our customers all under the servicenow umbrella so definitely uh had a great time working with you man it was it was really cool and i think we like kind of knew right off the bat you know like you were the process guru and like you you knew how to communicate the importance of you know an efficient process and kind of take what they were these customers were using today and try to start get them thinking the way they should be having these processes and how it works with servicenow and then i was gonna cache all those checks you were writing you know it was like it worked out well yeah yeah i just remember a couple times during the workshops you like when you're up there you know running and and workflow and things and you you're like yeah we can do that you're like mike we could do that right and i was like yeah yeah no problem we got that i tell you man i miss the human energy of being in workshops it's the one thing one of the many things we're looking forward to nothing like that so yeah i'll tell you i actually had one i actually had an in-person workshop uh about um a couple weeks back and yeah it was it you know what i don't miss though is how kind of exhausting a full day of that gets though 100 you have to be on the entire time eight hours plus and then go back to the hotel and do your work as well so i know i know i definitely um you had the coffee right there ready to go oh thank god so but um yeah mark so uh why don't you talk to me a little bit about the advisory services program at glidefast you know it's it's pretty exciting and it's obviously a huge part of our business right the technology is great but it you know we always say putting a bad practice into servicenow you know the technology is not going to fix a bad process or a bad workflow so no exactly it'll shine a good light on it it'll make it look pretty but yeah no the process is still going to be faulty so we we have a great pool of people here at glide fest amazing talent diverse across the country in fact across north america now we have team members in canada which is great and we're bringing our perspective our experience into these engagements with customers to really look at the way they're operating and help them improve on their day-to-day operations align them to best practice share our experiences share what their peers their competitors are doing and saying this is the why you want to go this route and then focus on okay based on our conversations what do we need the platform to do based on this new improved process and that's really where we come into play a hundred percent and you know what i love you know this is what i loved working with you and obviously the gladfest process consultings and advisory consultants follow this model is we didn't just we don't just accept you know what the customer's saying like hey here's how we do it today here's you know here's the workflow right we're like oh we challenge the customer a little bit right hey what why do we need five approvals here why do we need this swivel chair activity you know we could automate this we do we really need to to get approval from every single person here what's the business value there right 100 and we're seeing a lot of that term which we don't like to see is re-implementation right where maybe the first go around customers just went and turned on the tool and put in their existing processes in heavily customized the platform made it maybe look like the way they wanted it but not realizing they took the wrong path so one of our key drivers we wake up every morning really excited is we want to prevent our customers from having to reimplement we want things done the right way the first time so we we certainly politely and professionally will say look we hear what you're saying here's a what we believe is a better route to go down on industry best practice yeah it's an art form exactly what you said right you don't just you don't just come at them and say that's a terrible idea why would you right it's an art form the way you deliver it and i even recall you coaching a lot of a lot of uh customers or a couple of the people that we're working with on those engagements where you'd coach them like hey here's how you can push back on your management on your leadership because there's always one or two in the room that that disagree and there's always one or two in the room now like yeah he's right you know so you know and it's an art form and how you deliver that message and say hey listen that's a great idea but if we do it this way you know you're not gonna have issues with upgrades you're going to get you know you're going to get more buy-in from staff and you're going you're going to be able to repurpose a lot of your wasted time into more efficient you know areas of your business you know absolutely yeah in any engagement uh we we we identify people who may be challenging what we're doing and we identify people who will be championing you know our cause right we and we work with those champions to help foster the message and you know make the improvements we believe are needed in an organization so but you're right yeah we have to walk that fine line for sure yeah and you know you when you were talking earlier you sparked something that i i don't think we talk about enough in this industry is really the yig and yang of the an efficient process in an efficient implementation or the technical aspect right so not only do you need the technical best practices and avoid the bad practice the technical bad practices but it's the process side of things as well right like you really have to dig in to the workflows and how it's done today and you really have to challenge that status quo like listen i understand it works the way you're doing it you know doing this out of email this works you know but here's let's let's work to get to a a better maturity level right we know we can't go zero to hero right we know that but you know getting to that to that um you know perfect state we are close to perfect is there is no perfect it takes time and it takes little wins you know so you know getting a a a change i just i remember going through the change process at that large company we worked together i will not say the name but man it was like we start we ran out of whiteboard space a few times and we were going different walls and it's like guys we just got to simplify this let's make it simpler you know it yes there's a lot of data we need to capture but you know it's it's too complicated if it's too complicated people won't use it they're going to just subvert subvert the process altogether so and a lot of it is you know especially that large organization where we spent what eight nine days on just in the whole weekend uh yeah just don't change pantry it was about trust and empowerment and it was a lack of it in the organization where everyone felt that they had to see and and approve everything yeah and instead of believing in and the personnel they've hired to say look these are highly qualified professionals in this room you as a senior leader don't need to see everything you don't need to be you know the bottleneck essentially to put it for a lack of better work right you have to trust and empower your people to do right servicenow will report on what's working out what's not you'll know soon enough not everything has to flow through you so that was definitely a challenge we had to get past and we did and i thought we did an amazing job as a team getting everybody in the room to agree it's like this is gonna be the new streamline way to go yeah yeah right it's a journey to get there it's a journey it's a journey and i had i likewise i enjoyed that project and working with you so much so much so that i knew i wanted to work with you you know and i knew it was going to happen i honestly you know i knew one day we worked together and uh but but then we got that call one day yeah yeah no yeah i was waiting for you i didn't i didn't i didn't chase you i was waiting for you when you the time was ready but but um i guess if you if if we had to leave our audience with one piece of advice let's say there's a business analyst out there you know trying to migrate to servicenow or migrate a workflow to servicenow what's one piece of advice you would give them to just overall just uh you know migrating some of the service now you know it's it's don't accept the status quo this is if you're migrating from email for any other system in this service now yeah this is your golden opportunity whether it's in knowledge or in change or any anything that requires you know workflows and grouping people together to get the job done challenge look at it objectively this is your golden opportunity to make things better you're going to flip on the new tool let's focus on the process as well i love that mark thanks for joining me today and have a great rest of your day all right man thank you so much [Music] you