[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 [Music] hello everybody it's Mark Kelly here Chief customer officer and co-founder of all this part of our servicenow series I'm very very happy to welcome renicia Hansen renisha is a senior it manager at jabil monisa thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today in today's podcast we're going to be speaking a little bit about your role and some of the work that you've been doing at Gmail and the implementations and some of the outcomes that have happened can you tell us a little bit how you came into the world of service now first and your current roles responsibilities sure um so I've been working at jabel for almost nine years now and I started out first as a as a user of the PPM platform and um about three years ago I was asked to move into the role of the product owner of the itbm now SPM portion of servicenow we had just done a reset of servicenow we had really done way too many customizations but now I'm I'm the product owner I I've had used the platform as a project manager as a program manager than as a portfolio owner um but now as a product owner I see you've worn multiple hats throughout your career and it gives you a variety of different perspectives which I think is very powerful particularly from the design thinking perspective of walking in the shoes of different users and which I think is probably very helpful for your job it definitely is helpful because um you know as I'm looking at uh ways to make the tool more useful for others it's not like I haven't used it I I've definitely walked in their shoes yeah which is which is powerful and it's that insights I think can be very very helpful um as well so tell us a little bit about you mentioned how to write a recess and you know if we think about the Journey of any implementation you're kind of winning the hearts and minds of the different stakeholders from internal perspective external perspective too could you talk us through some of the the type of projects that you wanted to work on how you prioritize them and the journey that you suppose you went on and kind of getting people together and I suppose making sure that they're kind of ready for that Journey because you know if you think about it most people hey change certainly I think about I change when it comes to certain things in my life I like to say I don't but I'm realistic in that regard and I think a lot of people can be hesitant to change can maybe talk us through that Journey so when when you think about the reset it really was stepping back and thinking about was there anything materially that servicenow couldn't do out of the box that we really needed it to do so we really had to stop thinking about okay all of the little custom things that we'd put into place were they truly necessary did we really need those things or were we just being um so tied to the old system that we had prior to servicenow that that's why we felt like we needed to work that way and in a lot of cases that was true I think that we went to service now thinking I had to work exactly like the system that we had prior but now we've been in service now for a couple of years let's start maybe changing that mindset and thinking about what's working a different way and embracing more of how servicenow works and and just changing the way we work a little bit and we were pretty successful with that that's a great example of acknowledging a blind spot because sometimes it's it's actually don't necessarily it's kind of wood from the trees in terms of why you actually approach certain things in in a certain way and as well so there's been some really nice outcomes that have helped empower the team and you know add significant value and reduce time and things like that maybe you could share some of the challenges that you and the team worked on that actually helped improve outcomes absolutely so um one of the things that we've implemented is um this is planner as well as benefit plans so if you tie those two things together it's pretty powerful so our CIO every year publishes here's my strategies and goals for the year and then as we're doing our demand planning we ask our demand managers to really tie those the demands that they're putting into the system for the projects to those strategies and goals and also to document what those benefits are going to be for those projects then we've also embraced dashboarding in the tool so if you can imagine that then the CIO can pull up a dashboard that says here were my strategies and goals here were the projects that were actually realized and here's the benefits that they realized then when she's talking to the business she can say here's what we actually did for you and and that's a that's a question that comes up pretty regularly from the business they they don't want to know what you did last year two years ago they want to know what did you do for me lately and she has a way to show them that which is pretty powerful there's a lovely golden tread there because people have got short-term memories and you know my one of my favorite phrases is eating bread is soon forgotten and when you think about it you need that golden thread to kind of take people through that journey to to re-educate people to say okay actually we agreed this this is what we said was the top priority these were the reasons for that and then show them the journey you've been on and then the outcomes because everyone then feels good about that side of us and then also if there's any complications or challenges to that well then you can reset those goals and objective together and then it's really clear on the dashboards and I think a lot of businesses are really struggling to have that golden thread where they can visualize that and show the outcomes of the work that people are doing because people are working particularly hard but sometimes they can get all their rabbit holes and kind of stay away from the things that are really important that the user needs yeah you're exactly right so having having that information in the hand of the CIO and all of it management is pretty powerful so you mentioned dashboards and we understand the importance of that from the nitty-gritty level in terms of something that may not seem so big in terms of a Time Saver but if you scale it over a week a month a year and it can be particularly important particularly within project management and there was a good example that you had to hand in terms of um outcomes that for the end user were also very powerful also saving time and energy could you share that one please sure um we we've embraced dashboards that really all levels of information so prior to me coming to the team we didn't have any dashboards in servicenow so we've we really dug in and learned the PA tool within servicenow and how that might help us so we have dashboards that we've enabled from the PM level all the way up to the CIO that really showed them you know how's my project doing how's my program my portfolio doing health-wise um so they can they can see everything from um the quality of the data to the financials to um you know everything so my my incoming pipeline my my project scorecard everything that's going on within their portfolio within dashboards which is which is wonderful and we've we've also um taken a a step further with with financials for PMS um the PMS really had a blind spot with financials where they they really um we we use sap for our general ledger and it was kind of a mystery for them learning sap and how to really monitor the financials for their project was hard for new PMS coming into the organization so we've added an interface from the GL that pulls in um any non-time related expenses for the projects so they can see those in service now so the PM now just has one place to go for their financials to see everything for their project so they don't have to learn another system they could just see everything in servicenow all over there about Opex and capex it's broken out nicely in servicenow so it's it's right there you see them for them to consume and everybody wants things that are easy to consume in the world of distraction tell us a lid from the PM side of kind of status updates and making sure that customers uh aren't overwhelmed with the number of status updates they have to be sent to them but also the time and effort that's created in doing a status update not to mention the consistency of format yeah so um you know I've was a PM for years myself and I I can't even tell you how many times I've heard PM's uh really complain about status reporting I've even heard the phrase death by status reporting because I just hate it so much um so we wanted to really make it easier not just for the PMS but for the people that are receiving the status reports if if you can imagine a PM spending half an hour to an hour per status report making sure that it's formatted destroyed it has the right information on it and then send it out every week and then not only that but the person that receives it um if if I am a stakeholder I'm a VP I might be getting 20 of these every week so I've got 20 emails potentially all in a separate format so when I'm receiving these I have to look through the pages and figure out where the information is to pull it out um if you're a VP you get so many emails you don't want to spend a lot of time on those I actually had a VP tell me one time Renita I want to spend seven seconds per status report and it's so time consuming to figure out where the information is this is driving me crazy so we actually automated our status reports so they put the information into the stash board and servicenow we actually use a tool called Vivid charts to make it nice and pretty and then as long as they have their stakeholders up to date in servicenow it will send it out at a given time once a week and if I'm a stakeholder I receive one email not 20. and it has a URL to each of the status reports that I have um I'm a stakeholder on I can choose to click on the ones that I'm interested in and pull up that status report they're all in the same format I could easily find the information and move on it has definitely revolutionized our status reporting because it could potentially take 30 minutes to 60 Minutes to do a status report right I'm guessing you know and this has probably got that down to to minutes right yeah I can you can probably in 15 to 20 minutes max just put your information into the system now and then there's one version of the truth and you know that whatever happens that customer is going to be getting that message and once you're informing that customer and keeping them up to days it's a really nice way for that customer then can just share that information with other people and it keeps everybody um really in check with everything that's happening there so that's a really nice example and it kind of links in lovely with with the dashboards from within the organization there's any other um impactable areas come to mind that you've had within a role um sure I'm sure I'm sure there are we we are constantly looking for new opportunities to make it easier for our users and when you're speaking to your to your users how do you collect that information or feedback within the team to know you know what's what's next important because it's very easy to fall down the wouldn't it be cool snare where you work on a project that doesn't have the impact and quite a bit of morale can get knocked on the back of this so I serve um multiple what I was called delivery pmos within the company so I have a strategy committee that is made up of the leads of all those pmos and I meet with them monthly and in addition to that um I meet with the leads one-on-one every couple of months just to make sure that I stay in touch with them and I understand what their pain points are and um you know what's hot on their plate at any given time so I definitely stay in touch with those leads all the time it's it's really powerful it's really good and because you've come from a variety of hats in terms of the approach within using the product do you actually understand um where Possible Pain points can be and by actually asking those questions and staying in touch with them you're taking nothing for granted and it's a really nice way for you to be on point with the road map which is fantastic where do you see the platform evolving in in the near future I think that that servicenow seems to be putting a lot of focus folk on the agile area and I think that's actually the right area for it to be focusing on I think that um our business and other businesses that I've talked to definitely have a lot of focus on agile we we have a lot of teams that are moving towards agile and even product teams so um I think that's a good area renisha Hansen the seniorit manager at jabel thank you very much for being on our podcast today oh you're welcome [Music] 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]