[Music] hey everyone it's justin thank you for watching in this video i want to talk unified backlogs if you're using agile development and servicenow you've probably heard the word unified backlog what the heck is unified backlog i'm going to break it down i'm gonna make it simple first let's start with the definition of what is a backlog in servicenow a backlog is a list of stories okay so you can create a list of stories that haven't been completed that aren't part of a sprint and they could be really related to products they could be related to teams epics whatever you're going to see here in a second where the unification comes in if you haven't had a backlog set up what you want to do is you want to head over to your agile board within servicenow so that's under the agile development application which you can see right there as it went away when i tried to draw an arrow so there's agile development there's agile board that'll bring you to right here i don't have a backlog so i'm going to create a backlog and you can name your backlog whatever you want you can have as many backlogs as you want the purpose is to give you a place to go through and groom your stories if you're not familiar story grooming what we're going to do is we're going to assign them to teams we're going to add some points put in some acceptance criteria stuff like that but for right now let's give our st our backlog a name i'm going to call this one the dev heads backlog all right so this is for the dev heads team and i'm looking for a task type is a story so it's going to find any stories that are active and that are not part of a sprint so they haven't been assigned anything so that's going to be our criteria that's going to show me in my demo system and my uh quite a bit of story so i got 819 stories that are showing here you can see them all so this is what a backlog looks like now if you're grooming a backlog all you do is you come in here and you look at all the different fields you can fill out so depending on how yours can pick configured you might do a theme you might assign it epic you might assign some points this one needs some points so let's put some points in there 25 points it might want to associate with a product or a release or an assignment group so we want to say hey i want to give this to my deadheads team so i'll just type in dev heads oops i'll put a space in there dev heads and now it's going to go to my dev pads the group and once that's decided then it'll show up in the team backlog for them to assign to a group now maybe i'll put a description this one's rank agents by number of tickets resolved um so we'll just see sort of description right i'm gonna compete originally here acceptance criteria please work all right so that's me grooming my stories if i wanted to i could come down here and i could define some scrum tasks i could use this new button and i could create some subtasks for my story that might be part of how i'm managing this particular online interesting to break the story down uh for most people's stories are pretty granular already but let's go ahead and save that now i've gone through and that should fall out of my backlog it's not going to show any more well there's another way it does show anymore because it's still not assigned to a sprint so it's actually going to keep showing on the sport but let's talk unified backlog you just saw a story but what about incidents or problems or other things in service now that's got to get done and you have a team that's working through sprints and they're like how am i supposed to pay attention to my agile queue my sprint and do all this other stuff servicenow's got an answer so if you look right here i've got a triage board and if i click on that i can come in and see different things that i might want to associate with my backlog so look at here problems incidents tasks enhancements anything in service now that is based off the task table if you're not familiar with servicenow lots of things are based off the task table so if i wanted to say i need to pull in my incident so i can work on my incidents here we go i could pull an incident there it is i can pull an incident or incident task and associate and pull it into my backlog i could do the same with change if i wanted to pull in a change request i could do the same with problem if i wanted to pull in a problem i could even i don't know why you do this i can even pull in a catalog task watch this catalog task right here's one that might be familiar what about a project task you may have a project manager who's assigning you work and you want to put that into a sprint so you can manage it you can do that you can make a project task let's actually stick with incident in my example you get the idea we can pull any of these i'm going to leave the criteria that the incident is still active and the agile story associated with the incident is still blank meaning it hasn't been associated with astoria that's going to make sense here in a second so i now have a triage board with 2 420 incidents on it i can go to that board and look at all the incidents and say hey i need to search for the one where um it has the user in the description or maybe i want to search on a number so i got all these user ones oh there it is these are automatically logged out all i do i check this box and then i use this button here to add it to my backlog now what's cool when this gets added to the backlog it's going to create this little pacman ghost logo so that i can differentiate the incident from my normal stories that might be coming from epics or products or stuff like that so let's go all the way to the end here and we should see that incident down here at the very very bottom look there it is users automatically logged out you see my ghost from pac-man right there that is now part of my backlog this is what they mean by unified backlog we're bringing in other tasks from other applications into the background when i pull it up this is also cool i get to see both the incident information and a companion story so when someone's working through a sprint and they come across the incident that's in their backlog they're going to see all the incident details anything that the users put in there when they reported that incident the short description the long description any additional comments any notes any related records maybe it's a problem or a change request the resolution information what did the service desk do to actually fix this then they can come over their story and do the same things i just showed you associate it with a theme or an epic or a product or a release or an assignment group i'll just put this to my dev heads i could put it to an assigned to project whatever put in a description we'll just do demo and some acceptance criteria this is the unified backlog this is where the magic is so i just groomed a story that is related to an incident it could have been a problem it could have been a change it could have been a project task it could have been anything else that i want to pull into my backlog and this is what service now means by a unified backlog i hope you found this video helpful if you did please like please subscribe or share it with somebody you think might be interested in agile development backlogs and until next time don't forget to always be learning [Music] you