foreign 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] thank you hi everyone it's Mark Kelly here hope you're doing really really well I'm Chief customer officer and co-founder of all this and a part of our servicenow podcast series we are delighted to announce that we have a fantastic guest on the show today and he is coming to us from duke Health technology services at Duke health and his name is Jeffrey Manville and Jeffrey is a servicenow team lead at ducal technology Services as I said at Duke health and he's also been a scrum master of architect and team lead for the service now development team there he's been at Duke for three years and prior to that he was servicenow developer at Harvard Business School in Boston and he's presented at service now his knowledge on implementing the automated test framework he's found at Jupiter lab for data analysis and servicenow and is currently traveling abroad in Europe to attend duplicon Jeff thank you very much for being a guest on the show today hello thank you very much for having me here so would you mind getting us a little bit of an overview about yourself uh brief intro uh of the company would be great but you know you've gone to two you know when you think of Harvard and you think it's you you kind of take a positive thing so so tell me how you get into that world so uh I got into Harvard and Duke kind of um the regular way of applying but uh I've always been a big fan of service now I got in there pretty early it's been a family business I've several family members have done servicenow before so and applying got in but uh getting into Harvard that that was definitely the probably the hard Crux of getting in to have a saying it's harder to work it harder than it is to get into Harvard but um once you're there you're just surrounded by incredible people so it was a really awesome opportunity to get there and kind of absorb the the sheer knowledge and material that they have available and tell us a little about your current roles and responsibilities so I currently work at Duke University Health System in the Duke Health technology uh Services we um provide technology services to the health system which includes our three hospitals medical clinics our Research Institute and the three medical schools so our Medical School our nursing school and our School of Public Health um my job is to manage the servicenow development team I have um a team of eight developers where we are responsible for the development of the platform um we are pretty big fans of servicenow um Duke his own Service uh owned portions of service now for a very long time and we're continuing to iterate and develop new Integrations new automations new processes every single day and if you think about why servicenow is the platform of choice why do you think it is um I have the service now it is just so scalable and it's something that really can introduce multiple levels of maturity um to people bring to so that you can provide a level of self-service and that you can continue to grow into um it's reliability it's performance has really made it very attractive to Duke for a very long time and as we continue to scale it and introduce new new partners through our citizen development program um and as we introduce no automations new applications it continues to gain Empower and gain and Power and I think most importantly the really nice thing about servicenow products is unlike some area some other applications some other platforms where each thing kind of stands off of its own each addition to the servicenow platform feels more like a piece of the puzzle fitting together with everything else and really building on that kind of shared vision of it and under and understanding our our larger I.T system if you're going to go into the weeds a little bit what are the type of value or applications that are adding value across across the teams so uh vulnerability response on the SEC Ops is really a big space for us right now we did my Toms my TSM um some strategic portfolio management is always big agile management um but the one we're really really excited to look kind of forward to that I'm really um so we've also done some GRC but the one that I'm really excited looking forward to is clinical device management I think that's going to be a really exciting area for us to kind of quite a bright a broad range of areas that you've been actually working within what was the implementation Journey like yeah how did you get employees on board with the implementation because it isn't necessarily A straightforward thing definitely Duke University Health is a academic healthcare system which uh can mean that it's a it can be a challenging space to work and we have a lot of really complex um problems a lot of complex systems and a lot of really intelligent people to really get people on board I really think the critical skill for for all service now implementers is empathy active practiced empathy um implementing a new tool implementing new process for a lot of customers is a Act of vulnerability they are trying to show you here is our Dirty Laundry here's how we've been trying to clean it and how can service now help us um I find that listening to their pains understanding their process taking that and mapping it out is a critical component to understanding where you can take them and how to effectively Implement those Solutions because at the end of the day if the tool doesn't solve problems and solve pain it's not doing its job so really listening to people's pain and empathizing with it is really a Critic in the the critical Crux to to cross and to get customers comfortable enough to give you that feedback and to improve the product yeah I think that's very important because when you're getting it out of honest feedback you know at the moment you may not feel like it's a great thing but they're being really open and transparent with you and telling you from a recipient point of view how they see the world and that's that's really important you kind of mentioned that important you know empathy and and how you lead with that tell us a little bit about some of the roadblocks the implementation and you know how did you how did you manage true that because every day we've got different people trying to run through projects and sometimes they can underestimate the challenges this implementation can bring it and you know it's it's not uncommon for people to understand that most I.T projects they fail you know and that could be very damaging for morale and then to kind of get pick up things and go again and you do need kind of quick a lot of Courage I suppose courage and encouragement definitely I think that you know the biggest spot to start I always find is understanding where what the process is today uh an undocumented process is I kind of a landmine to me um my background is in industrial engineering and one of my favorite uh management quotes that kind of come from that area is from a book called the goal by Eli I'm trying to make sure I pronounce this right La Yahoo M gold Rat um any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion and that what that means is that there's a critical painful point in any of these processes that is the most essential thing to solve and without understanding your system without understanding your process and really having it well mapped out you're never going to really improve it so for really getting through these roadblocks really under um breaking through these these these issues and obstacles the really critical component is to listen to your users understand what what the steps of the process are what the goals of the process are um map out those inputs those outputs what are the tasks what are what do they need to accomplish them what are the decisions what do they need to understand and make a decision where are those pain points who's feeling them who's suffering from them and where are those being caused by understanding that when you go into the tool you have a shared context of here's what we're struggling with and now you're applying a tool to it because at the end of the day it and it processes are human machine systems machines we're really good at it is historically really bad at the human part and that's the part we need to spend a lot of time on understanding and I think it's the most important thing to start with um the other kind of big thing I find that everyone underestimates an implementation is data migration it just takes forever it always takes longer than you expect it's just always kind of a dirty messy thing there's always an additional Point within data migration is there that even if you go a very big strategic plan about your operations there's always something that you didn't necessarily think about or some different limitation and you know getting a variety of different inputs from the start is important but the cheese always moves in that how important is it to having the right people ready for the implementation and you know from your experience what makes a winning team uh the right people for an implementation is absolutely essential again it is a human machine system we are working together to accomplish these complex goals and get these complex valuable outcomes without people who work and collectively understand the process the whole exercise just is a hypothetical mess so I really think the we have to get everyone in the room we have to get a customer in the room to help keep you on the level um I think the key to that winning team is communication Clarity and context having that shared Vision that shared kind of viewpoint of a process understanding what is essential for us to succeed um that communication of our pains that as we iterate on the product and move closer to success that shared that communication and that shared vision is really essential for delivering on the final solution yeah I think when people feel like they're going on a journey and you've agreed what that shared vision is that's where discretionary effort comes and you can you can bring them with you so when you look back pre-implementation you know what advice would just give to yourself if you're you're gonna kind of start over again oh you know I I've said it multiple times but first start document your process it's gonna You're Gonna Learn where your pain is you're going to start it's people it's always a great place to start because it makes people feel heard and making people feel hurt is the most critical part from getting them to actually do what you want them to um and then one of the other things is ask your customers what they want to understand about the process I think I find a lot of implementations are missing that what do you need to know and report on about your process by listing those questions you have and understand that helps inform your data model what you need to document what you need to measure and helps you kind of take those questions and map them to where in your process you're actually creating that data um and then when you hand that off to Executives they have a better understanding of like what how that process works and how they actually supposed to extract data a lot harder to measure things after the tool has already been built if it doesn't measure what you're looking for it's got to be a lot harder to implement that understand the servicenows process always always a critical component like you have to have familiar familiarity with a tool because there will be a Divergence between the process that you have the process that you need the process that servicenow has built um it's servicenows on one size fits all solution with developers doing the Tailoring um again data migration it's just it's always going to be long so be forgiving with it try to start it as early as possible I usually just right after the process implementation you in the process documentation really informs the data that you need and what's essential and what's not um and the other thing I've been telling ever since 2019 ever since I presented that knowledge I'm telling everyone Implement ATF implement it first require it in your contract run them and look at the results every morning if you have ATF built you will your future self will thank you and more importantly the next person who has to pick it up after you will thank you because process documentation is nice but it falls out of date but an ETF test run every single day will tell you exactly how your process works and that the tool works every single morning great advice Jeffrey and my final question where do you see the platform evolving to so uh I'm in healthcare Healthcare is a really interesting history with technology um there has been this historic divide between uh our clinical device support and I.T um usually the The Divide is a port in the wall um so the big project on our Horizon is clinical device management um which is a kind of a combination of asset management and field service management I really think this is one kind of where our company is moving towards I think this is the most exciting project that uh I I've seen because this will allow us to bring a new level of collaboration and cooperation between two organizations that's never happened before I think doing this as a major Healthcare System kind of Bridging the um bringing this partnership between clinical engineering servicenow and ourselves I I think there's an incredible amount of opportunity for us to to actualize on and I think this could be an extremely attractive option for a lot of other orgs and teams at Duke a well done service oriented field service device centered solution in a healthcare system of our size um I I just think that like there are so many areas that we can apply that solution and so many teams who we can take this solution and apply to whether that's our operations teams um our biomed there's so many areas where I think this could be it could be helpful and I think with just a little sprinkling of self-service into that I think we can really help them uh deliver on services at the end of the day like I work in I.T healthcare because of the mission I think this is this is the greatest opportunity for us to have a direct impact on patient care and really help the patient and that's really the the our business at the end of the day fantastic you've been listening to all this podcast part of our servicenow series my name is Mark Kelly today I've had a chance to speak with Jeffrey Manville Jeffrey is the servicenow team lead at jewcal technology services at Duke health Jeffrey thanks very much for your time today [Music] listening to this episode of the all 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 [Music] [Music]