welcome to another episode of Glide chat my name is Mike Lombardo CEO of Glide fast with me is Tim catula senior bpc at Glide fast Tim what's going on brother hey Mike how's it going glad to be with you today oh man it is uh you know just you would just say chatting before the the stream here that man this year it it does feel like it's off to a good start and uh I'm really excited for 2023 this is our first Glide shot of 2023 actually awesome so Tim like you first of all I have to say you are probably the most certified consultant I've I've ever met I mean how many how many certifications do you own I mean if we're talking servicenow alone I currently hold seven um and if we're talking other certs you want to throw in idle foundations and CPE I'd be at nine I guess wow that's that's all and and we're talking seven like you probably you have like six six or seven CIS right certified implementation specialist five or six at least yeah I'm currently on uh six uh certified implementation specialist certs on congratulations congrats and you know there's always a debate about certifications out there of like you know certifications don't mean everything right experience matters and everything but you know what Tim like I always say to people you know whether I'm interviewing them or whatever I'm like if you don't have the cert you have to explain to me why you don't have it if you have it it's nothing else left to be said right um yeah I think certifications um they provide the foundation they prove that you know the essentials um obviously experience does Trump certification particularly less implementations but uh the certs prove that you at least know what you're talking about yeah and it's just another feather in the cap and no one's saying that's the end-all be-all right if you if you have all these certifications and you can't work with people and work with the customer and you know prove that expertise put that expertise to work you know that's that's definitely you know not not important but uh it's like I said it's another a feather in your cap and you don't have to explain it and you get to say in your intro you know you have uh six uh certified implementation special certification which is just unbelievable so congrats first of all congratulations and thank you for for continuing to to get that because that that obviously adds to to Glide fast you know capabilities and expertise and you work so hard for Glide fast can you maybe tell us a little bit about your background and um you know how you ended up here at Glide Fest sure I'll try to give you the summary versions yeah yeah Cliff Notes yeah the cliff notes version so I would say um after I graduated from University I started off down the like full stack web development path uh had a couple contract roles and kind of realized that that wasn't really the path for me yeah and while I was in graduate school I had an opportunity with a company here locally in the Detroit area where I live a managed services provider who gave me a shot to be a new Junior business analyst basically nice yeah and so my job came or started off being you know Tim go out and gather the requirements and document everything and hand it off to development and Shepherd it through a whole development cycle um you know after that eventually some of my technical abilities came to be known within the company and so they had me actually working on some other workflow software prior to transitioning over to servicenow yep where I was designing flows and uh particularly ironically enough in the HR space for our yeah our team after about a year and a half of that my vice president at the time approached me and said Tim we really need you to start working with the servicenow platform and transitioning into being the full-time business analyst in that capacity um did that for a little while and actually earned my admin cert and ended up becoming a hybrid business analyst and assistive administrator for the entire platform while I was there and so that's where I I really learned kind of the guts of how the platform works and uh were you a customer yes that was oh that's great yeah that's great that's great that's how I started I would say I started on the Berlin release and in fact one of my first big initiatives as a new admin was to upgrade us from Berlin to Dublin so Berlin to Calgary again to Dublin yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I did Aspen to Berlin actually in in when when we became a service now customer I think it was like 2010 they had just released Aspen so I I think like so I was like man uh this is you know it was going from like winter spring like years and Seasons to the named releases which was that's pretty cool and yeah I was gonna ask you because you have a lot of these quote unquote like technical certifications you know it's almost like you wear both hats right like or it's like you could be you could have gone down that developer path or you did um but is is your passion more on the process side I would say yes that uh that turned out to be more of where my passion uh lay was in terms of you know get working with clients to understand where they're currently at in terms of maturity and where they want to get to yeah absolutely and coming up with those road maps and uh and then you know moving into a design and implementation phase and yeah uh yeah why you know because a lot of people think um and sometimes I'm guilty of it too right A lot of people think you know everyone always thinks how important the architecture is and the technical side but maybe you can explain to the audience uh in me a little bit uh as why the process architecture up front in those those workshops are so crucial to setting the the stage for for the future it's crucial for many reasons Mike you know um I always say that to be a good bpc really um it's about learning knowing and understanding the overall objectives um of what the client's leadership and key stakeholders are and implementing the platform yeah um but also uh your client audience and also when to accept uh the requirement that you're being told versus when to maybe push back on it a little bit Yeah and say well uh I understand that that's the need but here's a way in which servicenow could maybe do that um without having to over personalize or create a custom process for them a hundred percent keep the Integrity of the platform and and Tim what you just said is truly an art form you know because there's there's a couple different ways to to approach that right when you say the way you can do it your way the way you said it which is you know the the best way of saying it in a professional way that doesn't hurt anybody's feelings and then there's the that's a stupid idea you can't do it no way you know like and maybe not that rack but you know even even you know even saying it without that much without that elegance and and you know if you say it in a way like the person's not getting their toy it they're going to push back on you right but if you say it in a way hey here's how you can get exactly what you're looking for but here's how it's going to play better within servers now and also be a better process right a better user experience and that is really so crucial to I think any Consulting probably right obviously specifically to servicenow as well Architects love to use the term technical debt right yeah yeah and you know when you when you that's great when you're working with itsm clients right but when someone like HR or CSM client hears that they're like what do you mean by technical debt yeah they're not as technically familiar with the platform right you're not familiar with development work so to them it has to be explained in terms of well you know if we do x y z and it requires us to do all these hours of custom work or custom person or personalization essentially yeah and then servicenow comes out uh two releases from now with functionality that meets 80 to 90 percent of what you're asking for now we have now you've just spent however many hours of of development time on you know and you get and you got to spend all that time in the debt what's owed is now undoing that right because I I always that's what that was what I was looking to say was time and cost yeah time and cost and to undo that right not even it's it's like you're in debt like at some day someone's gonna come looking to collect right like it's not even the money you spend to get there it's it's what is it gonna cost to get out of it now right totally I mean I can remember I I saw just as an example one time I saw several years ago an implementation of Incident Management where it had been turned into what servicenow would now offer as field service management yep and so that company now has to probably go back and refactor Incident Management start all over again and start all over again with field service as well 100 that's rough it's it's rough and you know it's sometimes and most the time it's not anybody's fault right like servicenow is very feature Rich today that's why when I see a new customer coming into service now I'm like you don't know how lucky you are that you get to take advantage of all these pre-built applications and features that frankly were just not here you know I was part of a re-implementation at Costco years ago when I was when I still had my technical jobs but and it wasn't there they had to re-implement service now and it wasn't because they did something wrong necessarily it wasn't even really bad practice it's they bought service now in 2009 you know and and they didn't have you know you know better than anyone didn't exist was recommended practice then yeah recommended practice anymore 100 and that's just the reality of of innovation as well it's it's not a bad thing on service now it's good that servicenow is constantly innovating and and some of it is just you know the cost of of if you want to be you know uh at the Forefront of digital transformation if you want to be uh uh first mover you're going to have some bumps and bruises along the way too right so you know totally so tell me a little bit about so so you're a senior bpc uh one of the best in the world by the way tell maybe for some of the audience know that yeah uh maybe tell some of the audience out there uh you know what are some of the roles and responsibilities that that that entails uh here at Glide fast and you know what you do day to day well certainly it's a very client-facing role you know I'm a big part of several implementation projects on an annual basis let me go through here and what I do typically is as I come in at the beginning and it's my job to understand okay here's what we need to accomplish on the platform uh these are the goals for what we're trying to build out yep here were the requirements of where how we're going to get there and ultimately this is the process we're going to follow and so I come in and I try to guide and Shepherd clients through the whole process of defining those processes and requirements right yep and then I go and I write those up usually in the form of user stories and we go through the various agile planning sessions and we move into development where the stories get handed over to TCS and we go through the development cycle uh and at that point it becomes a matter of a lot of times shepherding the client through the Sprint reviews um so at each uh at the end of each Sprint we go over the work that's completed we note any additional requirements that the client might have coming out of those problems but I thought that never happens two things I wanted to ask you and sorry to interrupt you but two things no absolutely jumped out at me one okay but one question I really literally legitimately have is we want to be prescriptive to our customers right and say hey this is how other companies in your industry do it right but you also need to understand what their process is today you know and like some sometimes you get the mixed match of customers sometimes you'll get a customer that's like we don't care how we do it today we want to know how other companies do it right but it's like whoa whoa whoa we need to understand how you operate today and then we can suggest improvements and get you to a happy path but we need to know what the Baseline is you can't just throw all that out because i.t's still moving or you know HR every every process every workflow we're building this plane as we're flying so like what's your perspective on that of you know being prescriptive but also understanding how they're doing it today and how to navigate those customers that way obviously being prescriptive is very important you know that's what most of our clients look to a bpc to do yeah um or or from a technical standpoint also the architect but yeah you know the job is is essentially um what do you recommend based on your previous experience I guess so I didn't phrase it as a great question either but it's like you know you want to ask the customer how they're doing it today and we need we need to understand do you agree that we need to understand when you go to a green film customer do you need to understand how they you know I'm going to IIT but like HR whatever do you need to understand how they operate today to to help them Implement service now I absolutely do um and that's for several reasons but the big one being you know uh change management right that whole organizational change management element of it you know if you're going to go through and have a whole transformational program and make major changes uh to your existing processes and it may be a complete process redesign right where we're going from our our current state and we're just throwing it out entirely and we're going to our new future State yep um but we have to understand the current state because that's a lot of change and we have to figure out how we're going to manage it right yes yeah 100 and you also said earlier about the audience and understanding so you said we need to understand the objectives and we need to understand the audience I thought that was really interesting because I haven't really heard anybody call that out specifically could you maybe elaborate a little bit on the what you meant by that this is something that yeah this is something that I've been trying to work on uh more in the last few years I used to approach my role in the in the early days I approached my role with okay Tim you're the order taker you know whatever the client wants yeah uh that's what they're gonna get you write it up and you hand it over and that's that yeah um now it's important more than ever to ask the question why yeah because if you can't get a good answer as to why a requirement exists or why a process has to be done this way yeah or and or if the answer is well that's how we've always done it yeah exactly no throw it out then that's not necessarily um going to be a great value add in term when we go to build that out into the servicenow platform right exactly you know my secret to that my secret man we're giving a lot of Secrets out here my secret is when there's something that comes up like along those lines I always say okay what's the business value of that requirement right like right what's the business gaining what's our organization what is the value of capturing you know how long it took someone to walk from the parking lot to their desk like what are we doing with that information right like is there a true is it helping you provide perform a better service to your employees to your customers by adding this requirement um that's that's a big one and then what's the other one Field's on the Forum right like yeah how badly do we need this data and are you actually going to report on what are you doing with it yeah like what's the point of capturing all this feelings yeah gonna load it into Excel and run business intelligence on it right it's a yeah it's a swivel chair it's a it's just a um it's how you always always done it and you know breaking through that's what the power of ocm and the value of organizational change management I think is just getting people to understand it's like it's okay to not do it the way we used to it's it's about where's the value in doing different things and that's that's what I always um try to or did when I was working with customers you know I'd always just try to get them to think about that and and I was thinking when you said like understand your audience it's real important to understand the Personalities in the room who the leaders are right because you have to be careful you can't make the leader in the room you know uh we can't overrule them you know but and that's why there's an element of diplomacy which is also important to the bpc role I think is is what you've been hinting at for several minutes now but yes there's definitely an element of diplomacy diplomacy for sure yeah keeping the room happy and and all that when I was talking about understanding your audience too also it's a matter of understanding um your your stakeholders as well particularly depending on what application you're working with right because I can be a lot more technical with an I.T audience than I can with an HR audience oh yeah nature audience I have to do some translation of terminalities I gotta speak hr's language more a hundred percent and then nothing like HR HR and I.T like oil and water right it's it's just two completely different things I wish they weren't but they are they are and I wish they weren't either maybe give one piece of advice for someone out there you know um looking to further their their uh process Consulting skills and you know get get to get to a level like like you're at and um what's some some advice you could give some someone honestly um yeah honestly I would say it's a matter of um always stay curious um you know make sure that you're always learning and always digging into um aspects of the platform or even aspects of other Technologies outside of the platform for your own awareness keep up that passion right and take every opportunity that you can to learn from people who are more experienced than you are I would say is definitely where I've gotten to where I am today but absolutely I couldn't agree more you know be humble and and soak it up you know surround yourself with great people too I mean it's um you're not gonna if you're the smartest person in the room you're in trouble right oh yeah but which uh you in this case you are so but uh yeah Tim thank you for joining us for another episode of Glide chat make sure you guys like And subscribe uh share it on LinkedIn and uh and check us out on Spotify as well thank you everybody [Music] foreign [Music]