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 hello everybody it's Mark Kelly Chief customer officer at all this International and you are listening to the all this podcast a part of our servicenow series I'm very happy to welcome Martin Ivanov Martin is a seasoned developer who's on track to be an architect and he is very helpful within the world of servicenow within the community and particularly on YouTube and also within LinkedIn as well Martin great to have you on the podcast today thanks for having me Health you've got a very interesting work history it'd be great to hear more about that and your journey into service now so um I just have to mention that it was not always like that in my early days I graduated something really different I am a environmental engineer I was studying environmental engineering here in Sofia then I went for a master in Spain it was quite nice experience by the way so I worked my first seven years my professional experience in the environmental and sustainability Consulting but technology always was always a patience at some point I decided to switch I identified the tech job marketers developing quite good and I decided for a career shift I left my full-time job and jump into an intensive web application development course with Java um this one was six month log without I lived without any income but I lived with the passion to to start something new to develop the right skills and jumping into the area the right way I apart from the hours that we had in the college I also invested a lot of efforts I sacrificed my sleep I limited all my favorite activities like fishing and playing tennis to the minimum and I was devoted all to the programming that is full on commitment sounds like something like from pursuit of happiness but Will Smith there so I'm really inspiring and how did you find the world of service now have your feelings been about it I I like to say that it was a chance during the course we visited partnering companies of the Academy and one of them got my attention it was an I.T consultancy which was implementing itsm Solutions which is something that I had never heard of before before joining the it but still this was a consultancy company and I had a consultancy experience and I knew how to talk to clients how to behave on meetings and so on all these transferable skills and I decided to jump in in fact apart from the technical skills that were not that robust back then I was able to apply all of my experience to the new role so I proactively reach out to this company and I was hired before the even before the end of the crash course that I mentioned earlier actually I was the first person out of these 40 people in our cohorts to be to be hired by someone and I joined a team which was developing I.T Solutions but not based on service now these were based on another itsm platform I was talking in one of the lunch breaks I was talking with to some colleagues from the servicenow team and I learned that servicenow is offering a lot of now learning courses some of them free of charge but more importantly I also understand that there is a free person of developer instance provided by servicenow which I think is a game changer for people starting with servicenow from the video from the very very beginning some of the projects that you've been involved in well during my first servicenow job I was hired by a customer so we were developing internally for the company it was not separated by projects but it was day-to-day tasks but afterwards I joined the Deloitte the biggest service now consultancy provider in the world and one of the first projects that I assigned to was a for a company which was splitting their legal entity worldwide and our job as a consultant was to split their servicenow instance as well and it was fun fact that I joined the company on Monday it was the 2nd of August and I was cleansing up a little bit my email from the Welcome messages from the team and I found an invitation for a kickoff event on the next day a little bit scared but I jumped right into it and the project was quite challenging because the company had service now since the early days of service now and all of the company processes were transferred and were implemented in service now via servicenow applications which means a huge number of custom applications huge number of tables Integrations and data and all of these had to be split and made available to the to the new Lego entities that that were to be produced after the split and the tough part this is a huge amount of data and every single piece of data had to be identified every single piece had to be tacked in order to be transferred to the corresponding company after the split and one of my duties there was to take care about the instance clone and I did a lot of extensive research on the topic I was not able to find a good robust article to guide me through the process so I decided to write one after the project end and I'm happy to share that this article was actually currently feature currently featured by Mark skodo one of these servicenow MVPs which makes me very proud of myself what I love about that story is few things you just put your hand up and you said I'm just going to jump straight in and see if I can add some value and you know you sent the elevator down for everybody because you didn't see the documentation to help you through but you said hey let's not reinvent the wheel here let me share my findings and then we've got Mike sharing it as well and actually funny enough a few enough a few more questions Mike was our previous guest he's got a nice question for you as well so before we jump into that question not only have you created content for the benefit of the service in our community but you've also benefited from advice from others it'd be great to hear an example of that yeah okay so see my second favorite project comes in play here we were developing a screening application internet here in Deloitte I was in the role of architect and then Senior senior developer there and as I mentioned it was a screening application but the initial requirements was something like 2500 searches a day which is not a huge number and at that point of time no one cared about performance but as it often happens the requirements then changed and the estimated load Rose to 200 000 searches per day and then one more time to 1 million searches a day it was in my queue to figure out how to speed up the whole process how to optimize the integration with the third party system and I as always I jumped into the community I asked some questions here and there and I got a lot of help from your probability mode roof and the Discord channel that he is driving and I implemented these suggestions and I was able to reach not the 1 million searches but actually 3.5 million searches a day so I speeded up the whole thing 40 times with the help of the community and by the way I have two Community articles written on that topic as well [Music] you are listening to the oldest podcast when you're looking to scale your team or if you are interested in showcasing your company in a future episode reach out today or if you're in the market for a new role visit our website to view open positions www.aldis.com one of the things that I've noted within the community is the Fantastic personal brand as a result of your computer Community engagement tell us a little bit about how that kind of came about so now I'm back in the days of my first early days and service now the community was one of my primary sources of knowledge so this is the place where people discuss complex issues and solutions for cases which cannot be funded in the initial documentation the documentation covers the base case scenario but quite often we as a developer fell fall into cases that are not that easily solvable with the documentation and being there constantly at some point I gained confidence not only to ask questions but I also started answering questions I also started sharing interesting service now content on LinkedIn which gave me a wider audience I have new followers every single day which is according to me is a sign of a good quality content and another aspect of the whole thing is the mentorship service now launched last year a mentorship program where I became a mentor I was assigned a menu with whom I have a monthly mentorship sessions where we discuss small wins and challenges on his with a service now development and the I am also proud to share that he recently admitted that if it was not my mentorship he would probably give up service now because he started working with another platform and he is not dealing with service now on a daily basis but instead of giving up he continued developing service now excuse instead in his free time and even though that these are not a crucial for his career development right now which makes me a lot of happy I I retained one more person into the space which will probably become a content creator in the future who knows I love that what a fantastic story thank you so much for sharing it with us you've been awarded for your content so congratulations on that Martin what does it what does being a servicenow rising star mean for you thank you yeah as a service now healthy to recognition programs one of them is the community MVP which is being given to the highest to high as performing people in the space and my goal is of course to be there one day but this year they launched another program called the rising star it's an intermediate program actually a stepping stone today for contributors aiming at the MVP award but who are not there yet so the program is designed to support these people to reach their full potentials and potential and probably become a MVP one day so the award comes with a lot of perks first the recognition but being one of the 58 people worldwide feels pretty good and the award itself it's not alone it comes with some perks which I cannot mention right now but one of the things that I can mention is that because of the award I was invited to participate the knowledge conference this year which is a whole new universe for service now developers this is where the place I this is the place where I met a the CEO McDermott I was pretty much inspired by his keynote speech I attended hundreds of presentations about some successful projects and the new product developments in the area as well as a participated the Creator on which is the small part of the conference dedicated to the technical People Like Us and I also met some clients which I knew only online and we had some we had the chance to have some drinks and Casual chatting in person which is a quite valuable these days with the pandemic and all that stuff what an exceptionally exciting thing to be a part of getting to do all that and to hard work and effort you got there which is absolutely fantastic it's just so exciting to be a part of but I think you're probably inspiring a few other people online as they listen to this now what advice do you have for those looking to join the servicenow space have we changed your career path so successfully something that I have ever done if you decide to something just do it the service now space and the environment is very inclusive there are tons of free content as I mentioned one of my inspiration was D3 now learning courses so these are available to everyone even now service Now is offering the first and the foundational certificate for free so you can get certified actually at no cost the only thing that you should invest is some effort and preparation but yeah there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands people out there ready to help you and guide you to the first steps as well as for the more complex Channel challenges that you will face in the future and you only think that you need to invest is some passions so be there be passionate be proactive and of course be consistent and persistent and the success will inevitably arrive as it as it happens in as it happened in my case fantastic advice really good advice but the question that actually Mike asked is do you think servicenow growth may slow down and if so why okay it may slow down but not significantly and not in the future years what I think about that is right now servicenow is the most robust the most how to say the most the most complete software service platform and a lot of companies are investing a huge amount of money in the space which means that these implementations should be further maintained and enhanced and I don't see this thing slowing down in the following probably 10-15 years recently I read a statement by Robert fedorok saying that if servicenow at some point dies this will be because of the level of customization service now recommends that people stick the end company and stick as much as possible to the out of the box functionality because the over customization is then not maintainable if we as a developers and Architects and advisors manage to advise our clients to stick to the out of the box functionality and minimize the optimization to the minimum then I don't see any reason for the Slowdown excellent now your turn what question would you like to ask our next guest okay I don't know who will be the next guest but I guess it will be someone like just like us with a lot of experience centers and service now so my question is and it is a challenge for me as well my question is how do you manage to maintain your servicenow knowledge to to learn the new stuff because service now is developing new products quite fast and we as developers it is a little bit hard for us to stick with the base and while serving our clients at the same time so if you can share some tips and tricks on how to enhance your knowledge on a daily basis I will be grateful brilliant question absolutely brilliant question Martin you've been listening to the oldest podcast as part of our servicenow series and my name is Mark Kelly Chief customer officer at all this International and today I've had the absolute pleasure of being chatting with Martin Ivanov and Martin is a rising star who's been doing fantastic work within the servicenow consultancy area and he's been also adding a lot of value within the community LinkedIn and social media and in the podcast we've been sharing about his journey to now some of the work that he does how he add value to the community we talked a little bit about some case studies and we talked about her potential for servicenow to add significant value in the future Martin thank you so much for your time on the show today you can do it was my pleasure being here foreign [Music] 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 podcasts 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