[Music] the oldest podcast is brought to you by all this International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the U.S and Europe today you are listening to our servicenow Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of servicenow and digital transformation foreign [Music] Kelly I hope you're all doing really well I'm Chief customer officers at all this and I'm very happy to Welcome to our servicenow podcast series part of our all this podcast Mike skodo Mike is a servicenow certified technical architect and MVP Mike it's lovely weather here in Dublin how are you getting on over there yeah we have the same weather here it's still sunny and I hope it will remains but I heard it should be rain in the next days let's see so you've worked in it for several years now it'd be great to hear about your journey to servicenow yeah I was a soft architect for many years and starting with my business career but there was also a project Manner and consultant and to be honest I came to service now quite late at the end of 2019 due to the poor economic situation of my company there were no new projects and I started looking around for New Opportunities and that way I came across an a new small team which we're dealing with service now and I was really curious to to see what it is and during the Christmas vacations I started Googling Services because until then I never had heard anything about it and I was immediately fascinated and affected by the extraordinary culture and the endless possibilities the technical platform provides recently you've been awarded the servicenow community MVP for those who don't necessarily know about the community MVP I'd love to hear about how you've been inspired by the community and why it's important for you to share your knowledge yeah during my first explorations of the service now Universe of course I quickly came across the community portal and I started asking my first questions there because I had a lot of questions and it was really impressive how quickly the answers often came in and at the same time I started networking with other users on LinkedIn building my profile and so on and through that I noticed how some users then proudly announced that they had been awarded a community or death MVP and seeing how a kind of hero status was built up for these MVPs made me yeah to be honest a bit envious and I decided to become also an MVP this might sound strange but all my life I have used such challenges to move forward and Achieve something valuable but of course you only can become an MVP if you enjoy passing on knowledge which is something I still do today and um my first career aspiration was to be a teacher and even though I didn't become one unfortunately I always enjoyed guiding colleagues or conducting training sessions for customers and therefore also participate in mentoring program of servicenow and the biggest advantage of being a mentor or trainer or expert is that you have to dig much deeper into a topic and to learn much more that way than you were on the other side of the relationship I love the way that it also challenges you to be able to really articulate and explain your explanation in a really succinct straightforward way and it really comes across how knowledgeable you are because you can do that and people can really learn and I I love that how you your aspirations to become a teacher and you've taken that ability to communicate messages for other people to learn from which is fantastic tell us some examples about some of the way that you teach and some of the examples out there of how knowledge can be transferred to be honest in my current situation I don't have so many opportunities to teach something because I'm doing projects I'm I'm a technical leader for a large projects but as I mentioned I take I participate the service knowledge mentoring program at the moment I'm a mentor for one mentee and of course if the customer has some problem to understand something I'm always willing to explain the service now and yeah and I also are connected on LinkedIn and if users are asking me something but my only restriction is to time now I'm in my projects the full day and it's hard to find any free slots to you know to live my passion I think they've been quite modest because you've added so much value in the market so far and people learn from it every every day you know it's really really inspiring to hear about your success within the servicenow ecosystem within such a short period of time what advice do you have for orders in the community yeah that's excellent question I think that the answer depends on whether you want to ask something or whether you want to answer the user's questions and in my opinion the users who ask a question have by far the more difficult job because asking a clear and understandable question is a rare skill nowadays and unfortunately I often see questions where users just have copied a user story or requirement from their current project and through the community form without any further explanation and here I would have to do a time consuming questionnaire to get all the important details I need for my understanding and this can take several days and it's usually frustrating for both sides and also many users don't seem to know what the difference between a summary and a detailed issue description is when scrolling through the list of all questions I see summaries that are simply truncated descriptions or even incomprehensible and therefore I ignore them somehow it should be like a debate on how to get an expert to buy it the summary must be short and close show the rough direction in which it's going and above all make experts make expert curious and on the other side if you want to become an expert yeah you just have to take the first step and answer a question and please do not be intimidated by other experts every one of us has given the first answer at some point and yes it can take a long time for you to be marked as helpful or correct and therefore stamina is the most important skill if you want to be noticed as an expert in the community and you will have to have a plan or a strategy for example at the beginning I had planned to answer at least 10 questions every day and to write additional articles on a regular basis and therefore you need a plan now you can check whether you have fulfilled or not it's brilliant advice and I liked where you're planning out the allocation of the work that you're going to present to the community the questions you're going to answer you mentioned an interesting point and to be don't be intimidated some of the areas we've seen in the past was were that people wanted just to have such a perfect reply or answer that they didn't want to put it out there so there is an element of it's never always going to be perfect but you're making a good attempt to help people on their Journey so that imposter syndrome can sometimes jump in but you just need to really manage this effectively so your advice is don't be intimidated to offer your advice do your best but be very careful with your time they actually allocate it effectively so you can actually achieve what you want to achieve yes exactly that's a good summary and I I follow Community nearly two years now and it's interesting how many users are challenging to or competing to get a higher position sometimes after feeling they they just want to earn points and this is another aspect of community but at the end I think most of the users are there to help other users and it's a great experience if if someone is saying yeah thank you that that had helped me really and this is the best feedback I can get it's more valuable than any points let me a little bit about where you were having some challenges with your servicenow implementation and work or maybe feeling a little bit overwhelmed how did you manage that at first it depends on my current project if I'm if yeah in mostly in the beginning of a project you have no time to do something in the community but after some weeks or months the project is flowing and you have more time and then I start checking the community which new questions are there and if I see I can answer these questions really fast I will do this and sometimes I have an idea for an article in my mind and then I start writing one paragraph a day and mostly at the end of the week publish this and sometimes I have more time sometimes I have less time yeah it's really dependent on my current project today's podcast has been what Mike scudo Mike is a certified technical architect a servicenow certified technical architect and MVP and Mike's been telling us a little bit about his journey to now how he got into the world of service now the importance of teaching and sharing within the community advice for people who actually enter the community such as don't be intimidated to to pose answers to questions to learn it's never going to be perfect and if you do want to add advice and share your knowledge be mindful that you need to actually allocate relevant time to wish because it can be a time consuming process even though it can be very rewarding it can take up your time and just be cognizant of that with the work that we do Mike also gave us a little bit overview of some of the challenges and how he actually managed his time effectively to overcome them Mike thank you very much for your time today whoever thanks for listening to this episode of the oldest podcast if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcast Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also head over to our website www.aldis.com to listen to more podcasts view our open roles and stay up to date with industry news thanks for listening and stay tuned for more great episodes coming very soon foreign [Music]