welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans is a showcase of servicenow personalities that have punched above their weight and elevated the servicenow community titans of now is brought to you by me robert the duke fedoric if you want to see what i'm up to check out my website theduke.digital here you'll find all my cj and the duke episodes links to my youtube content and my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that win servicenow jobs hey everyone welcome back to another titans of service now in this episode we are bringing to you a special guest this person is the founder of a company called genus that you should check out um she is a servicenow expert par excellence and she is the reason i believe servicenow has been able to go so far so fast with their itbm product offering which is now called the spm product offering i believe this person has put the industry up on her back and carried it for a touchdown uh it's my pleasure to introduce you to a mentor of mine and somebody who's had my back when it was against the wall miss edda wilson etta thanks for being on the show and it's so good to have you here thank you and thank you for the compliments okay um we mostly start these with an origin story so why don't you tell us how you got your start in servicenow world so my journey on servicenow started when my boss came in after a meeting he says i have some good news and some bad news bad news is we are not going to renew our plan view contract which i internally paused because i had been on plan view for eight years he's like well and the good news is we would like you to move us to servicenow and i thought the help desk i'm like okay and so uh we started doing some mapping on the functionalities that we were using within plan view and started mapping into servicenow and there were some gaps so we got together a meeting with servicenow to decide you know how we were going to deploy knowing that we needed to be able to do project management with capex opex and resource planning and basically all of the things that we had you know in the plan view world and so um and we had to be live in 11 weeks so we were in berlin at the time we went live on calgary we did have to custom code a lot of it but 11 weeks we were live and i decided that well you guys are missing the functionality of a lot of stuff i've got a lot of background in this how about we become design partners and i can basically give you you know my two cents in life so were they did they have the full capex opex and resource management in the version that you uh came up on did you help them build that no it was not there wow it was not there so the pieces that were missing like so we became design partners and helped on input on that and so it worked out really well and then the other thing too is you know we still needed help and the thought process was well yes you can go find a partner but we were going to have to train someone so why not train servicenow so they had they still had remote services so we partnered up with the servicenow remote services team and we had hours from them to help us build out some other pieces as well and so from there that's where it started i started speaking at knowledge and snugs and here and there and references and i drank the kool-aid at what point did you switch from being a customer to rolling up the itbm consulting under genus that was what happened was there was an acquisition and the new company only wanted to use a piece of servicenow and i had already gone down the path that we can now do resource capacity planning so october 31st 2015 was my last day at care fusion and so genus started november 1st 2015 and by the end of the month we had our first customer that might have been right around uh when i started asking questions about itbm because i read the doc site i went through all the videos that they had on youtube and i was still like i don't get this because i don't know if you feel the same but um it was one of the larger modules where they said hey let's do this too but it was a distinctly unique world in terms of like you couldn't just come from itsm learn servicenow in the context of itsm and then just go have a successful itbm implementation right correct correct because if you think about it at the time and it actually went it was ppm then it was pps project portfolio suite then it was service strategy then it was it business management and now we're on spm you know strategic portfolio management and it really is a collection of use cases across this whole time and so i tell people you have to go define your business process then go find your lego blocks if you kind of follow the documentation because the documentation does everything in it you will find that your implementation may not have a positive outcome yeah right um and where do you find that people have the most difficulty like when they buy itbm like what's that gap between i've bought it versus a successful uh deployment of it i guess a better way to ask that question is what's the hardest thing about deploying itbm not starting from the business and the reason why i say that is we go in we turn it on and we sit down with the customer we do the demos and then we sit down in the workshops and it's like well what do you want and it's like then they say well what do you have they hired us as the guidance and the experts in the space what you're doing is you're getting requirements from them and then you go build it on the platform and then you're upset with why you didn't really define the business process and so if you don't understand how project portfolio strategies work from a business perspective it's pretty hard to get itbm or spm stood up correctly because but at the end of the day you have plan work you know you have defined work unplanned work and planned work spm falls under plan work okay so i'm going to intake plan work i'm going to align it to my strategies and goals i want the business to decide do you really want to do this and how soon do you need it and you know do you have any funding for it and if you do then send it over to the next group it may be i t and maybe marketing maybe wherever whoever's going to build it then you do all the assessment what i see is people ignore ideation on the platform it's like the little guy in there nobody uses it ideation is the sweet spot because if you shift left to the business and allow them to build up ideation and do true strategic you know portfolio management there so one of the first things i always ask for can i have your strategic plan i need your org chart and then we start there so new ideas come in you align them and then when the business says okay we would really like to do this you accept it then it goes over to demand most people dump all the noise the good projects the bad projects everything into demand and then you're trying to do you know road mapping and everything with like thousands of planned work and it doesn't work so uh i will be guilty as charged in terms of one of those people who kind of like um i won't say skips over ideation but i have a really hard time trying to get it to fit in and maybe i can quiz you on how you would consult me if i was your customer would that be a fair thing to do right now it would be and go ahead because you're going to find out it's easier than you think because you're talking to the business right so we asked to talk to the business customers so you're not talking to the i.t side right but in terms of like let's say i'm the solution architect for the customer right i'm the person who's in charge of making servicenow go and it's in its totality so the first objection i usually have is like the stuff is coming in right now anyway it's coming in but it's just coming in as incidents or it's coming in as catalog requests and it's even coming in the wrong way right however you wanted to find that somehow i wound up with a problem record that had an idea for a capex spend project in it or a catalog item or an incident you know or an hr request they're coming in anyway through channels who's who we can't really control the intake of so how do i get stuff into idea prior to getting it intimate into demand reliably so let's say that it does and this happens all the time it comes in as an incident you discover that it's really not an incident at all there are better mechanisms on the platform now to basically redirect it so that it comes in through ideation so is it fair to see you concentrate your focus on mechanisms to like close convert records yes okay because all planned work must come through ideation period okay so you kind of tie up all those holes in between because the other nice thing about it is that now that you have all work of an enterprise coming into ideation now you can really take a look at how much work do we really have and then you can start to do some things with it and the other thing that i like about it is there's not a lot of functionality i shouldn't say functionality not a lot of fields or what have you on the table and some of them they've actually taken off which needed to stay but once you get everything there so now i have all ideas there i can now now we have ideal category you can align those to your you know business units or some other way the other nice thing is if you have business relationship managers because it's kind of like okay business says knock knock who answers a lot of times who answers depends on what you want but then you force the customer to have to decide is it a project you know is it an enhancement yeah they don't know they don't care they just want what they want so don't do that to them allow them to come into one place have someone there answer the door then bring it through the process and if you think about it it's not until you get a couple steps in but you really need to decide what it really is right well the the what it becomes is a function of the demand management right yes so where do you where do you make the breakage not the breakage wrong word where do you what's the border between idea and demand at what point does it stop being an idea and it becomes a demand or something else strategic alignment and the business wants to do it it could be a penny or a billion bucks so you come in strategically align it try to get the goals together and if it's something that they want to do then you queue it up and you can even actually leave it in ideation there's a field if you're an older customer you still have this field it's called a start implement date and then end implement date it's just the fiscal year you can set the fiscal area that way you can start to do your planning you know your three to five year planning and just leave the pieces there and so then when it's time to do annual planning or if you do continuous planning you know whatever you want to do at the point that they say okay i really do want to do this and i want to do this in this fiscal year then you accept the idea bring it into demand and then that's the breaking point do you um thank you for the answer by the way uh on to demand how should a customer um deploy demand like they have a bunch of groups interested in it do you see people deploying like one big central demand authority or do groups kind of have their own demand piles and they process demands on their own so one of the things that we guide them to do is when we come into demand is then start to get the portfolios and the programs together because then that'll also then tie back to the funding right and so then depending on if it's an enterprise you know if they're enterprise-wide or if they're still you know everything is i.t and they do business projects then it kind of depends on the portfolio so folks you can see why i'm always knocking on at his door because i do a lot of itbm work and she's lived it you know i've i've learned it but she's lived it and uh that experience has really mattered um and what is what is your favorite part of the spm suite i have to tell you ideation oh yeah yes it is just oh wait actually okay i really do ideation and apm but the business architecture part of apm which actually goes back to ideation because one of the things that happens is okay so an idea comes in first thing you ask yourself is is it a duplicate right if it is you know say what duplicate it is and it's gone the next thing you asked yourself do i have the business capability already with my core systems dusting like am i using like on the healthcare side am i using epic you know um lawson servicenow blah blah blah blah and if it is then you know there's another filter and if not then what you know goals and strategies does it align to get all that information in and then decide you know the business governance group is this something you would like to continue to you know that out and so just in ideation if you look at the tap that ideation has to the rest of spm all of those pieces are there it kind of taps it starts to you can start the business case piece in ideation so so that when it goes over to demand you can actually start that process over there but that is the most i'm sitting here grinning like that is the yumminess of it because if you get that right everything else works smooth because when you get into demand you start to do your funding and a lot of people don't use you know the resource plans and the cost plans to actually get the money for their project they come in as like oh i got a million dollars for a project well how do you know you haven't taken it over to demand to decide what resource groups do i need do i need any assets am i going to do training is somebody going to travel so yes it allows you to and you have fields there now where it says what is it plan cost one of the fields now where you can put in what you've got what they gave you and then as you build out the resource plans which then you know create the cost plans you can get okay this is the real cost so that you can go back to governance for your real money before your project starts instead of getting into your project and finding out you ran out of money that's like the distinction between planned costs budgeted costs and actual costs right yeah thank you it's the budgeted cost yeah that one threw me for a loop right because it's like oh i plan to spend this much so what they're only going to give you right or maybe you're blessed with the organization that says you're planning on spending one and a half million but we know how these things grow so we're going to set aside 3 million encourage you not to use it but we'll be smart about this i got to tell you my favorite thing is way lower on the totem pole i love rydex i just love the idea that um you know we're if we're planning this multi-million dollar project that's going to span a year or two that there's this idea that stuff might go wrong in that journey or stuff might be you know it's just i call it like the the real life work for pm's yeah the non-wbs tracking of a project manager's life and i love how they just integrate with status reports and i love how they all have cost estimates and i think there's so much opportunity for workflows in there or flow designer stuff that it's just completely untapped and i love like pms tend to be really happy when i introduce them to it absolutely all right so you've been at this for a while you have been basically at the bleeding edge of this tech and um and kind of leading the way in the industry but what can you tell us about a time where you thought for sure you're not going to make it this time right your back's against the wall there's nobody there to help you uh absolutely uh the first year because i came out and you know i'm all you know quit my job still gotta pay the mortgage got the first customer and and then the second and they started coming in and then one of the things that i learned the hard way vendors don't pay their bills on time but payroll still needs to happen i forgot my choir role but i'd be over here just yes and and so that that was hard and then we we ended up with our first customer where we were in requirements gathering forever that was at pivot point and that was really the turning point of okay if you're gonna do this you are not going to do the traditional consulting where we sit around forever and just talk about your pain and and i had to pivot we've done everything from insurance brewing yes you can use servicenow to brew beer all kinds of industries we needed to pivot i chose healthcare because my mother had lou gehrig's disease and i took care of her for 11 years and i have seen everything from the insurance when i went back to work i had to go back and i became a project manager at a health plan and she was in the hospital so i've done health plans medical devices been in the hospital it's like okay you understand the business of health care make that pivot and so it was the hardest time and then it was trying to do the pivot because we were since we were smaller practice we were commercial we weren't enterprise and then i got the opportunity to do our first hospital and it changed everything and even our approach you know we were doing this walk run fly bit and what the account exact taught me he says you must sell full cars you don't want to get in the car and go where's the steering wheel oh that's next phase so even though you don't implement all the details of spm you give enough we call it the happy path and everyone if you haven't seen the happy path um we can get that out to you because it shows at a high level how work comes in how it's assessed how it's executed on and how it's deployed so if you follow the happy path like initially in demand unless you have to do assessments in demand leave that alone until next phase so get into production yeah my least favorite part of demand necessary but least favorite yes yeah so that was it yeah i remember you teaching me about happy path do you have like a web resource we could put in the description maybe or i can i can put something together yes or we can have you on cj and the duke and we can just have a whole discussion on happy path right there you know what we really should have a whole discussion on happy pathway because that that diagram actually started with me at care fusion and it had refined itself and it's it actually just went under kind of another refinement i like simple you have to get into production and you have to use the tool that's the other thing about spm you cannot spend i see these two years deployment of spm i'm like what are you thinking it's like you're gonna have two releases a year and you're trying to deploy like all these applications we had a customer we did 22 applications in 16 weeks you have to get into production so you can use it then give me your feedback right yeah no doubt um and i feel it's just a different i think it has has somehow there's a collective consciousness there and an awareness of how development works but when you get into the pmo sometimes it's just like you know they'll sit they'll talk for as long as you're willing to sit on the stuff that will make this work better for them and they'll imagine all the scenarios and then you can just you know you can be weeks later months later still listening um so you have to be a little bit prescriptive right very prescriptive so what we ended up doing is building repeatable solutions so there's like four solutions we have now and that's what we demo that's where we start and you know we're flexible in some of the pieces where you can come outside the box a little bit but really not so much because we've been but been there done that we know that it is not a successful outcome if we allow you to come outside the guardrails too far and you won't be happy and we definitely won't be happy nobody will be happy yeah okay so we've we've heard your trench war story now tell us what you're most proud of in your time at servicenow in your time with servicenow i'm most i'm most proud of the platform and finally getting those repeatable solutions they're so tight we could actually put hours on them and put them up in the store wow fully documented that took a lot but it had to be done it absolutely had to be done because everybody has their opinion on how things should work and yes it's like okay here's life according to etta or life according to genus but it it's still it's based on experience it's based on being in the mud it's based on talking to customers um and we we got it right yeah we got it right we're just you know a little smaller nobody knew about it that's the thing there's so many new people at servicenow i was acknowledged and i introduced myself to someone who is um well known in spm and he didn't know who i was i thought oops i'm sorry wow why are you sorry this is why i'm making no i mean because you don't want to say oh let me reintroduce myself oh yeah i know well i'm gonna do that for you with this video right this is why i you know i've kept this spot in the pantheon open for you because people need to know that you know there's a time there's two companies that were basically doing the whole itbm thing in servicenow one of them i won't name their names because i don't want a lawsuit thank goodness they don't exist anymore right and then there was etta and those were the only people doing like the really hard work so i want people to know uh if you could change anything about the servicenow ecosystem or the product what would it be uh we need to get capex and opex at the task level in the platform i'm like yes okay so i've been building it since care fusion well not me personally but because you know what i mean and this the thing that's interesting is it it really is a straightforward um enhancement because you know once you put the expense type on the task table all work can be either capex outbacks so put expense type on a task table default it to opex because you have to prove capex right yep and then let it roll when you and then you just have to tap some of the business rules a lot of them let the business rules run do an after then come back and place in what you need to so you're kind of in there so that you don't blow up everything because you can blow it up yeah but i do believe there is someone at servicenow that i've known for a while she's a cpa and i really believe that that is going to change hopefully in the near future but until it does you know you got to put it in no kidding like i have it's the first once i really got financials right from a pmo perspective then it was like my god how could they possibly leave this out of the platform and please product management service now if you're listening this please hear us out right you're the platform for work what kind of work all work right who can afford us only big corporations it's like the idea that you're executing work at all if you can prove its capex like if you want to get companies to save big money giraffe money right the amount of money it takes to adequately ask what is it going to take for me to have a giraffe as a pet okay if you want cut your customer base to save that kind of money you have to be able to at least have the option on every task type to be able to say this is capitalizable work yes you know otherwise it's just you're essentially like the help desk tool right you're you're a more advanced help desk tool but you can you have the capability to become a finance tool and then the dump truck one more dump truck loads of money i mean they got a what was the goal they got to double their revenue in the next how many years so i do believe that that functionality will be baseline soon yeah i hope so i really see i just i put that into the universe that is my favorite answer for how would you change the product on all my titans of servicenow episodes yet absolutely all right it is it is it and yeah okay we have a few minutes left uh why don't you give some advice for people who might be starting new in the space so and i've seen a lot of this so we have all these camps you know we'll teach you service now all the rest of it and they get into the tool and they're overwhelmed because of how massive it is okay yes i would suggest coming across the tool so that you can find your favorite spot but then find your favorite spot and notice i don't say niche because that's kind of like my favorite spot was always you know i've always had that project management background i it's my contribution and on the health care side my contribution to the universe that you need to manage work so think about this when covet hit and you were a hospital system isn't it a wonderful thing to be able to go into your portfolio and say i need to free up you know 10 million dollars where am i going to get this from and to go into service now and in less than an hour you find your 10 million and you've reallocated it off to another portfolio so yes discover the platform in the different areas but then find what feels good to you and learn the business side stop going in it's like oh i'm going to be serviced now and i see this oh i just got a job blah blah blah and i thought okay so when you go learn the business there's nothing like being a developer and you have absolutely no idea what the business function is so what are you coding you're coding to requirements of somebody in pain but you don't know that they're in pain because you don't understand the business that is that is serious wisdom all right folks this has been my mentor my savior when i was doing itvm work etta wilson thank you so much for being on the show eric thank you i appreciate the time this was fun if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or linkedin profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via linkedin or the email pictured here as i offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1500 subscriber youtube channel and mailing list and thousands of linkedin followers let's make sure your open positions get first go with the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the emailed picture here