hey everyone thank you for joining another episode of Glide chat my name is Michael Lombardo I'm the CEO of Glide fast Consulting along with me today I have Michael Y and Travis tulson I'll allow these gentlemen to introduce themselves Michael yeah hello everyone my name is Michael y I'm the chief Solutions officer for Glide fast Consulting I've had the pleasure of working in the service now industry uh almost 15 years now so I started off as a customer went live I've been doing consulting and implementations for the last uh nine years or so so it's been an amazing journey and I'm definitely glad to be here awesome Mr Travis hi I'm Travis Tolson I'm the lead architect of emerging Solutions at GL Fest Consulting I've been on the platform for about 9 years or so and uh specialized mostly on service portal and uh custom application development the three of us have a lot of service now experience I'll tell I don't know if I've ever been on the phone with uh three people with over 30 years combined but that's pretty impressive first of all you know just want to say it's an honor working with you guys I love every day working with you guys you're two of the best in the industry and thank you for joining us on another episode of Glide chat and thank you to our audience make sure you like subscribe and follow us on Apple and Spotify so today we wanted to just touch upon just quickly discussing service now road maps uh obviously a big part of Glide Fast Business is you know architecting customer road maps and helping them along their journey and half of that battle is is planning right so service now is a very deep and wide platform and there are many many workflows and processes that can be rolled in and the most efficient organization has more workflows rather than none in one platform right so I think it's a good topic to discuss us I don't know if Mr ye if we want to maybe give some thoughts what you were thinking around road maps I know there's really two different types of customers I think we can talk about is one is an existing customer you know that maybe has been on the platform for a few years and trying to figure out you know what next steps are leveraging what they have today and then maybe we can touch upon new customers as well where do you start and where do you go so I'll turn it over to you Mr E if you have any uh suggest questions kick us off yeah absolutely I mean I remember my very first implementation as a customer you know it was you know we went live and I was talking to my VP I like well you know how how did the how did the implementation go and I said it went great but we got 500 enhancement tickets that was the first week because everyone's like this is such a great platform we wanted it to do everything and we didn't know where to start we were caught a little bit off guard because we're like we expected some adoption but we really didn't expect like this Avalanche of people saying we wanted to do this I have this application I have this Notes application I have the SharePoint thing and they all wanted it at the same time so one of the things that we kind of do here at Collide fast is as part of our engagement whether it's a phase one or phase five or Phase 10 is to build that road map and we always call it a a living road mapap so you understand where you are where you're going and what that also allows you to do is you know we see things on LinkedIn we think see things on YouTube where they go hey you know Travis Tolson just you know had this excellent blog great idea let's make this the number one priority if you don't have that road map you don't know where that ranks with the other scheme of things so a lot of the times we have that living road map so that when someone gets this great idea we go where does it kind of fall in the road map and one of the things which we constantly do with our customers we always have these road map exercises say let's take our subject matter experts our leaders for our service now platform get in a room or you know in a virtual room now and see where everyone's priorities are and I remember one of the the first projects I did with Travis we basically had leaders they had little sticky notes and they had five sticky notes and they were colorcoded and they were saying okay if you want you know the blue one you know this is worth this many points you put it on the road map item which is the highest priority to you but that way we got like a really good idea in terms of what was important to everyone as opposed to kind of getting detracted over you know the the numerous amount of HS that come in on a daily basis 100% And you know as I'm listening to you you know I think the biggest driver of where to start where to target right because that's always the biggest thing is you know everybody want ESP you know we get a new toy right everybody wants to play with it everybody and everybody in the organization believes their process is the most important right and they want it first right and um I think you know a good thing to focus on maybe we can call this number one is okay where where can we get the cost savings right because financial decisions Drive 90% of a lot of organization's decisions right so is there an application we can eliminate is there is there an application that serves one purpose that we can roll into the larger platform like service now I think that's a great point I don't know Travis if you have any thoughts around that I know your passion your whole role is really identifying kind of those siloed workflows that you know maybe companies are doing an email or doing uh you know in one application and and one thing that always not not to get off on a tangent but a lot of customers always say hey service now is great it's a Cadillac it's it's a little expensive but to me there's true Roi right there's true cost savings because you're paying for one infrastructure one platform rather than all these different vendors right yeah and I mean I love that first point of of look for the cost savings because I mean if you paid attention to anything I ever talk about ever it's measure measure measure but something that ye brought up that something that jumped in my mind when when uh ye was talking was that um you know you also want to get a feel of kind of the the passion in the room where's where where's the heart of the organization where's the heart of the people in the organization and I feel like that's kind of what the what our little sticky note operation uh elicited out was you know okay yeah we've got we've got the metrics we know what the numbers tells us important but but where's your heart you know and I know here at Glide fast we're we're all about where where's the passion and following that passion and that that's kind of what jumped out at me about the sticky note thing is it's kind of a measure of of where's your passion where's your organizational Drive yeah because you really got to have the the Buy in you really got to have people that want it so so taking stock of that is really important 100% And you know that that goes along with it's it's top down and bottom up right like if if we don't have the leadership Buy in that hey this is the new platform that we've we've purchased we're making an investment here we're changing the old ways of doing things we're changing the swivel chair activities and we're committing to service now but and that's a great point is is the passion is is getting okay not only we making this investment for financial reasons right but we're doing it to make people's lives easier and better and not to eliminate jobs I think one you know big misconception is that you know service now and you know automation is is here to replace jobs right and you know it's really not the case it's really to make things easier so we can focus on you know more important tasks and you know get out of email and you know cut down the time of resolution for cases and incidents and problems and challenges right so you know let's say maybe I'll tell this over to ye so ye if we maybe let's say we have a new service now customer you know the typical journey and now we are seeing different entry level points right or where entry points where you know traditionally it's always been the itsm The Incident Management first but now we're seeing customers you know maybe start with HR in some cases or customer service management right and I know with service now you know there's opportunities to get both the customer service management and the incident in itsm IT service management kind of all all in one big bang but in your opinion you know if you have a new service now customer what what are maybe and maybe we don't have to get too specific but what are some of just high level suggestions that we can give on how to road map and how to prioritize and I I think we all touched upon it at what point do we put things in that backlog right because you know you guys know we've all ran workshops we say hey that's great we we glad you want to do that but that's like a phase we're at we're at maturity level zero here we got to hold that so what advice can we give to the community out there of you know how to prioritize and how to you know put certain things into the backlog right so that kind of recalls a you know an engagement which I had where we had one customer they were rolling out CSM and with a lot of our customers there was a fixed amount of schedule and there fixed amount of budget so they kind of had to prioritize I mean in an ideal World they wanted to have a really clean front end which is a great customer experience and then on the back end you know they wanted to make sure that their uh you know the customer service agents you know a lot of the automation you know a lot of the lookups a lot of the popups just everything kind of happen for them but they realize really quickly we can't do both we don't have the time we don't have the money so what they did and what we often tell our customers is what is your business objectives what is what is most important to the business and in that particular case they were saying customer experience is key we want to make sure our customers have a clean experience One-Stop shopping when we want to make sure that you know they're not fumbling around having to do a lot of interactions and that particular case they were willing to for lack of a better term sacrifice the internal customer service reps into a phase two and phase three at the expense of kind of getting phase one out and that was understood so that when we went through the workshops we understand okay we understand internally you're not going to get your 100% because we can't do that in Phase One and phase two there's not enough money there's not enough budget this is what we're going to do for the customers this is what we're going to do with you and because we had that alignment and what Travis was saying when it's coming top down from the leadership it's less of an argument when people say Hey you know that's going to be a little bit harder you know you're not helping me out and with the road map is saying we haven't forgotten about you it's just going to be in this other phase 100 perc and you know I'll tell you a little Consulting trick for those Consultants out there you said it ye is when a customer brings up maybe a use case or something that they think is a high priority you know I always ask that exact question instead of saying hey that's a bad idea or that's not important you never want to say that that's that's one little tip but a good a good way to make them kind of think about that is asking that question where's the business value here where's the business use case where is the business our community getting value out of us putting energy and effort into this requirement or story or use case so that's a great point and another thing you brought up I think Travis can can help us here is when you talked about portal and obviously that's that beautiful front end where our customers can interact with the service management organization whether that's it HR or even the customers right and maybe Travis I know portal has been so much of your world for a long time what do you think's more important and and I'm I'm generally curious about this do you think having a more robust easy to use great phenomenal experience front end portal for customers and end users first or building out the backend first and making sure the processes are tight and the services are being fulfilled the correct way what do you think's more important so I mean I I I hate to put it this way but I think that they are equally important yeah that's and that's coming from somebody who lives Service Port important you can't leave the processes out of it but I think an interesting take on this is that you have to ask yourself or another way of seeing this is where is where's the best place to put your effort just because they're equally important doesn't mean that they're deserving of equal effort yes backend processes service now has some phenomenal capabilities out of box B ready to go you know plug it in and run it may not meet the same processes that you were using before but that's a good time to evaluate do your processes need to change you know if service now is going around and establishing that this is a best practice and you're off of that best practice it's a good time to re-evaluate those processes and maybe update and and modernize to a better solution or if your processes are the way they are for reason how what parts of the existing process can you leverage so it doesn't take as much work service portal on the other hand there is so much more effort that you can put and get value out of your service portal in service now you know I like to to state that you know the service portal is a customer service agent yes it is for many people the first customer service agent in dealing with that part of your organization do you want that agent dressed in ratty shorts in an oil stained shirt or in a suit and top what kind of experience do you want to put forward and the the Baseline service portal is a it's a good starting point it's a good starting point but there is so much more that just a little bit of effort can make that a beautiful experience for your customers totally agree and I think you hit the nail on the head as well you know I think it's important if if we can leave our customer with one thing to take away maybe from this podcast I would say don't shoot for perfect day one right you're never gonna get perfect and the beautiful thing about service now is it's never done there's always more automation there's always a better experience we can provide there's always a better UI we can modify and and if as long as you're following best practices as long as you're you're you're following the best solution model model you can continue to innovate and continue to automate so I think exactly what you said Travis is we can do both right but we don't have to spend six months at a time right doing it we can roll out Leverage What service now has out of the box add some configuration and best practice and best solutioning and get us to a healthier State and just using service now puts us light years ahead of using other products absolutely I think that's a great episode do you guys have any other comments you want to leave anybody with keep your road maps updated I mean you can't let it go stagnant I mean that's kind of the big thing just because you did it once like you said Mike was constantly evolving so 100% awesome all right thanks for joining me everybody all right thank you thanks a [Music] lot [Music] yeah