[Music] Chuck here inviting you to get the first look at the now platform Washington DC release the service now Dev Advocates bring you another tech now webinar on February 1st 2024 this webinar spotlights all the cool features service now admins and developers care about so sign up today at devlinks R to claim your spot that's Dev link. sn/ t97 regge see you there [Music] to go from service now admin to certified Master architect is an incredible journey Our Guest today shares his insights on how he made that happen and why welcome to breakpoint the service now developer podcast hello service now admins Builders developers and curious individuals and of course I always say that with the utmost love and respect for you you you and you you and and you yes you listening in the back welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career my name is CH tamasi I am a senior developer advocate here at service now and I am joined by the one the only the lovely the smart the creative senior developer Advocate Lauren McManaman how are you Lauren I'm doing great Chuck how are you happy holidays you live those intros don't you I do it's a nice warm up for my day well we have another special guest with us today because in this episode we are going to talk to Chris Shu who is an independent consultant and he's also taking on the title service now magician how are you today Chris I'm doing great Chuck and Lauren thanks for having me today and I'm sure by service not magician you don't mean you just wave your hands and like flows appear or something oh absolutely not no welcome to breakpoint before we get started let's do a little intro tell us a little bit about yourself sure uh I began my service now journey in January 2017 I was working in a company and they had a customer that was migrating all of their legacy systems into service now uh so from there I moved through the admin and developer journey and I became a technical consultant in 2018 at a boutique um service now partner known as wire fire at the time wirefire then got acquired by KPMG Canada in 2020 and that's when I became a senior technical consultant uh near the end of 2020 I started my own firm and then just this year about halfway through 2023 I became a certified Master architect so I was part of the January 2023 cohort and I got the good news in June of 2023 woohoo nice job that's a that's a heck of an investment I'm just curious what what made you decide to strike out on your own um I really enjoyed working for multiple partners doing different projects so that was the main reason and I was very fortunate to have uh my first contract start right before the KPMG roll ended so in fact I had landed one before IID even you know served notice the KPMG and that way so that was was really the impetus for it and you know I worked at KPMG loved the people loved what we were doing and knew that that kind of would give me the street cred for lack of a better term to to kind of Branch out on my own uh and I'm still running just a oneperson shop so this is just me and that's all that I'm working on with my my firm well one thing that we always like to ask our guests it's getting to be one of our favorite questions actually is tell us a story about a time that you did something at work that you possibly thought you might have gotten fired for and maybe if you did get fired what did you learn from that story do you have an example for us uh yeah I do have actually a couple example so it was hard to pick for one one of them but I do have just one and I know that a lot of people kind of have this experience where they delete the wrong records and mine's kind of the opposite of that so it starts with me UND deleting all of the records that I should not have so I was looking for a fix script on the community and I was going to run it in the dev instance and it had the word query misspelled so I opened my Glide record on the deleted records uh table and then the word query was misspelled therefore it returned every record and in my fix script I did you know wow gr deleted record. nextext uh I was undeleting everything in there so on a Friday afternoon I you know created the fix script started to run it in the dev instance and then went about my you know lovely weekend when we get back Monday morning and everyone's saying all of their work is now being undone or has been undone so it's running all weekend and it still was going Monday morning trying to undelete everything in that deleted records section long story or I guess long story long we we ended up having to contact service now support of course they were there to help us through the Journey and we restored the dev instance from Thursday night's backup hey nice so we did lose all of the work on Friday and we lost the Monday Tuesday while we tried to figure it out and discover an action plan um you know it was a great learning experience fortunately it was in Dev so it did not impact the production instance and uh also fortunately everyone was quite kind on on helping me learn from the mistake and make sure that we add a little extra technical governance on running those types of things so and shout out to service now support for for that nice little layup there helping always yes yes that was back before you could do the request yourself oh oh fun stuff and what did you learn I learned that we should always have a second set of eyes uh on the scripts you know now that you can kind of the compiler will pick it up for you and highlight the mistake so it didn't back then so it was a second set of eyes and what I also do now is every single fix script before I put anything into a while loop I just do uh right to the system log and do a get row count and make sure I'm returning the right rows the right number of very wise that's a a great debug statement it's the like the only time I use get roll count is that's the only time I allow yeah that's the only time I allow it through as well on my Cod or anyone else's all right when you're not at work hopefully not UND deleting records what do you enjoy doing uh you know I enjoy sports like hockey football tennis and soccer also enjoy spending time with family and friends so we we like to go out and do various things um and trying new restaurants and new Cuisines from different parts of the world it's one of my favorite things to do do you have a preference yes well you know I've I've always been a big fan of any type of Cuisine from Asia so that type of food is is always up my alley and there's such a wide variety there um including South Asian food so I'd say that you gave us a little bit of a hint as far as your working history what were you doing prior to even learning about service now well my career starts way back in 1998 I believe uh so I went to college and it was a co-op program so they would Place us for8 months and then we would go back to school for eight and and so forth but once I graduated college then in 2000 I started my first developer job at a dotom company how'd that go oh well it eventually became a dogon you know the classic Bubble Burst and you know we we had a great idea but they just couldn't make a go of it and then once the the investor money ran out so did the company uh from there I went to Best Buy Canada and I worked in the help desk and then after that I actually had uh a contract company that uh or a magic training company that I worked for as a a contractor so I would be in uh some of their training videos I did some of their customer service work I was uh also wrote and published a couple books through them uh and then after that I moved into to the uh a provider that sold stock market data to the uh TSX Toronto Stock Exchange and NASDAQ and then I went into that request management role in about 2010 2011 for that telecommunications company in Canada and it was while at that company I first got exposed to service now all right I want to know how did you get your start in service now sure we'll go with that yeah okay so like I had said I was working at this telecommunication company in Canada and they had a customer uh that was in the request management space and they were consolidating a bunch of applications into service now and one of those applications was the request management system so I did have a previous development background so I was part of the team to build out a service catalog in service now and that was my first real experience with the platform and then I still remember that first week or two uh I called called my mom and I said you know this platform was going to be a large part of my career and you know it was like we all struggle to explain what do you do and how do you do it and all those types of things I kind of had that my first struggle conversation explaining what it was and what it could do and why I was so impressed with it you know I used to joke saying that this is military-grade software that they somehow let slip out to the general public so that's that was U how I got my start in service now was that service catalog project very nice is there anything that you happen to like the best currently about your job now you made now you've had you've worn all these different hats and now you kind of transitioned into this new role and this new future is there something that you really like the best about it I really enjoy the community collaboration and the the support that everybody gives each other in the community so I've been in certain or different it groups and I've never seen a community as supportive as this one one of the things that really help help me get through some of the next hops in the career that I my career Journey was that someone literally sat down with me and patiently explained and re-explained the same thing several times until I got it and this has happened numerous times from numerous people so thank you to every single person out there I know I've thanked you personally multiple times so if you hear this you know you know who you are but uh I they always just asked all you need to do is pay it forward and that's what I really tried to do is also become that that helpful person that can step in and provide either the technical career or just even the architectural guidance on getting people going on the right direction so that they can avoid the pitfalls of maybe copying and pasting a script and undeleting you know seven million records I love to see how that pattern how is pretty common in the service now world so it's it's so nice to be surrounded by so many altruistic people that really want to see the community as a whole grow and get better it's very cool and I always tell people you're never too early to start sharing your experiences in this career no because there are a number of people that are also just starting so let's all learn together from the beginning exactly so how did you go from admin to CMA in six years it was a lot of work so I want to make sure that people know that they can do it and I believe that you can do it but at the same time I want you to know that that it was a lot of work and at every stage of my career I had a goal of the next stage so when I was an admin I I had the goal of becoming a developer and then when I was a developer I wanted to either go to senior developer or consultant H and then when the CMA program was announced a few years back I knew I wanted to complete that program or or at least make an attempt to join it therefore I started to adjust all of my career goals to help me move Mo towards that CMA program for example there are certification requirements so I started adjusting my learning plan so that I could work towards getting the minimum requirements for the CMA program because just like everybody who's starting out at some one time I had no certifications so I had to work slowly towards building and learning them and then maintaining them in addition to that the CMA program has the requirement that you must lead five up to you know at least five um large scale projects so I started to ask to be the junior architect on projects hopefully that get getting me the experience so that I could then become the main architect for these programs and working towards that every single year is what what got me here and it was a ton of work I'll just say many many many long hours hey don't have to tell us twice we've seen how much work goes to that program and is astounding that anyone completes it so again huge round of applause for getting all that done it's also a lot of work to get that application in so if you're looking towards applying for CMA I spent weeks doing my application reviewing it revising it this was not something that I could just you know write out on a Sunday and then click submit no and I think they have a specific number of people that accept into the program correct yes that's true yeah every C has a number it's worth putting all that effort in well tell me this what was your motivation because that that takes it like you said said it not only considerable considerable amount of work but a lot of planning kind of really getting multiple years worth of goals lined up so what was your motivation for following that track in the first place I had found a lot of times I was in a meeting and I knew the right thing to do but I you know I knew the right way to implement it the right approach but I often lack the ability to get the required Buy in now this can be related to communicating effectively with the SE Suite or maybe a process owner or a manager or or anybody else involved with with that development so the CMA program I felt would do two things one it would give me instant credentials so that my ideas would be listened to and it does that when you when you come into any meeting and you announce your CMA and do a little blurb on what it is and how you got it you do have instant credibility but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get automatic buyin so the program also helped me build additional communication skills to Target those specific audiences and deliver a message that resonated with them and enabled me to get a higher chance of getting that buy in and I'll be honest I don't always get it but some you know it has improved drastically based on the training in the program and the credentials that come behind it and then in addition to that I you know I really do believe that we're all equal on that project team so we succeed and fail as a team if the business analyst doesn't you know get effective business requirements or if the developer doesn't successfully implement it or if I don't architect the solution correctly or get the required buyin to implement it across the organization if any one of those points fails then we all fail as a team so therefore I think that we are all equal and I know that there's kind of a differentiation between certified technical architect or CTA and CMA and I see them as equals as well I I see that we have different roles and that we play a different part in the projects that we implement but again we all have to succeed in our individual rle so that we can succeed as a team and just for the audience and maybe also my own sake can you describe the differences between the ctaa and the CMA programs sure so as of December in 201 23 because these programs are changing often the the certified Master architect program is a six-month program uh and you have a little bit of a higher level of requirements to be accepted and it's cohort based so you have to submit an application be accepted and then you do a six-month program and take a board exam to to pass that uh their focus on this is looking towards aligning service now products to uh address challenges deliver outcomes and measure them through kpis and it we touch on every single aspect of the platform every product every supporting piece in the foundation Etc and it's a lot focused on building that communication and transformation Journey story to communicate to the SE suite and get that buy in the CTA is the certified technical architect and this is one where you just you apply and it's a you need a few fewer certifications and experience to get in but you're more technical so you would be doing the actual scoping you would be going through and and helping do these Technical implementations and being more handson so those are the main differences uh between them in my opinion and you know if you really are interested in still remaining Hands-On keyboards then you're wanting more CTA in my opinion and if you want to do more presentation and strategic guidance or advisory then you probably want to lean more to where Wards the CMA program and there's some people that have both so you can do both overachievers yeah yeah and here I was thinking the CTA was the Chicago Transit Authority and the CMA was the Country Music Awards boy was I wrong now we introduced you as the service now magician how did you find a way to combine your technical side of service now with the artistic SLC creative side of magic during the the first week of the CMA program so there's a kickoff week that happens in Santa Clara so we all got to go to the offices and see everything there I I kind of noticed some overarching themes in the presentation so magic is a lot about presentation and successfully delivering service now Solutions it that involves a lot of presentation skills as well so I kind of saw there was some parallel things and that you could illustrate certain themes with uh magic tricks so previous experience had has me you know familiar with a uh being able to build a stage magic show and and align it to certain themes and tell a story overall and when we kind of got to the now value framework there's those four stages Envision create validate and Champion I kind of already had tricks that I knew how I could perform that would illustrate those those themes and then also be able to tie them into a almost well I guess it's a combined magic show and PowerPoint presentation to walk someone through the now value journey and then illustrate the fun parts or the stages with the trick we're gonna have to hook you up with Glenn Pinto he's one of our uh Master technical curriculum Creator director something he's in our training department been there forever yeah and he also incorporates magic into some of his presentations oh does he oh that's cool see so I'm not the only one doing it I love the idea but I did get the first LinkedIn moniker oh there you go has been thrown why I always like talking to people that have these other existing passions outside of service now because oftentimes they bring other unique traits to the job as well so have you noticed any attributes that you've taken from being a magician that have applied to your service now talents as well yeah I would probably say it's mostly the presentation skills so I was very confident doing public speaking and being able to Pace myself and not rush the pronunciation or enunciation of the words and get through all of that whereas other people that were perhaps uh in in my program were more technical than I was and had more skills and experience on that side of things they they may needed to may have needed to work on the presentation skills a bit more so you know we found that we were all at different stages of the journey we we all had different current places where we were at in all of these different skill sets and we kind of leveraged each other to to accelerate and get get better in the areas where we needed to so I could help people out in the presentation skills I could give them rehearsal pointers on things like that and then they could come in and say well here's some of the successful architectures that we went through to deliver this product that I didn't know existed there are some new products and service now that we learned about in C me that I was like oh that's that's neat I'm glad we we learned about it so and it was also nice to be able to find a way to make things fun and entertaining while also enlightening so keeping that engagement with whomever you're conversing with is is a critical part because we it's so easy to just check out and start doing an email when you're in some of these calls especially if you're not on camera or you know sometimes you even see people like covering their mouths and I'm like I know you're on another call and you've just muted me but so you're not getting away with anything but that keeping them entertained and enlightened and and engaged in that conversation has worked tremendous um has been tremendous for me in getting to getting that critical buyin that I needed to to advance the project further and there's nothing wrong with the occasional hand flourish either that's true over here in the flow we're going to create a Tas that's right I can't even do it badly no how bad it is that's jazz hands people on camera missed so much of that the blessing and the Cur of having Audio Only yeah they they miss so much oh maybe someday we'll think about making this video but not today all right moving on to the next question what would you consider the highlight of your career so far from like an overall perspective I would say there's a few um postmigration up update emails that I got to send out saying we have successfully migrated to production and then having no issues come up in hyperare so a couple of them were large projects that took you know eight or nine months to get through we literally just had one that went live last week started in June it was a very long uh Journey but we went through methodically and we really worked closely with the client to make sure that everything that we were doing especially because there was a lot of data that was being moved around that everything was planned tested and clean so in addition to building the logic and the functionality we also did a data grooming exercise and now you know their cmdb data is much much much cleaner and we even have a path to reuse some of the functionality should they need to do like a phase 2 Data load or anything like that so there's an operational handoff that happened and that's probably been one of the big things so far in addition to being a guest on this podcast because I've been listening to this one since the beginning oh wow I have yeah and got to set a new goal you know I every single time I've seen anything posted by either of you and anybody else in the developer Advocate world it's been just fantastic so I just want to say a huge thank you you really annoyingly Chuck helped you know you taught me GL Glide Ajax episode 33 I'm sorry about that no the way you broke it down though is the way that I kind of have used to teach it to other people and then when they say well how do I do glide Ajax I just they just get a link and that's the only time I send a link just do this video tech now episode 33 that's right there you go a consistent plug on this show it's a good one well speaking of overall Improvement and continuous learning what things do you do to continuously improve as well you know we've kind of talked about what is the highlights but what are you doing to kind of carry you on even Beyond like help set the next bar uh well I always try to focus on learning something new every day and I know that's kind of a cliche but you know I'm looking towards always improving what I've either written in the past so I go back and review old code or old implementations and look to say now that I know what I know would I do it differently and often it is yes and then I also try and become a better listener every day I know that that's something that I kind of speak over top of people sometimes so I'm trying to get better in that area and then if I'm doing anything technical I really try to focus on breaking it down to as the simplest as I can get it um into a tool and or platform agnostic language so then I can focus on delivering those outcomes in service now using that most sustainable approach possible and based on all of my previous experience so every single thing I try to build is better than the last I try to use use analogies whenever possible or metaphors it it it just makes it a little more relatable of course you have to know your audience and use the right metaphors for whatever it is you're trying to represent but it can be a bit abstract when you're dealing with technology but to put it into great example is when my grandmother she was like 96 at the time she asked me what's the difference between hardware and software and it's like you know that's a great question well I knew she was a piano teacher and I said all right pretend you've got a player piano okay you can't change the keys you can't change the strings that's the hardware but that scroll with the holes in it you can change that and that tells the hardware what to do so the scroll is your software it's a program it's a set of instructions to run in an order and the piano is your Hardware she went oh I get it now yeah that's a great analogy easy as that okay continuing on with the learning theme I'm curious to know no you said you're always trying to learn something new what did you learn this past week so in this past week I've kind of been relearning how to resolve and troubleshoot Discovery errors so we we're on boarding working with a new customer and they've got you know 78 to go through so they're all you know we can group them first and find the the most important ones and prioritize them again according to the now value framework but actually getting into the weeds of that and how do we address this specific one I is something that I'm kind of going through again so there's a lot of support documentation on there there's some YouTube videos on the doc site as well so I'm always referencing the official documentation and then going out to the community if I if I still need additional help and Discovery was one of the modules that I I struggled with on the on demand uh course so it's a complex product and then you need the underlying infrastructure knowledge to be successful in it uh and eventually I I had failed the on demand test so I paid for an instructor-led course and went through it that way and I was able to ask all the questions I needed and then close all the gaps in my knowledge and then I was successful with the exam so I think that a lot of people also need to forgive themselves these tests are hard this stuff is complex so if you are unsuccessful that first time take with the feedback you get from service now work with your your mentors or whoever you know in the ecosystem and try again and forgive yourself move on and and try again every failure is a learning opportunity yeah well the concept of forgiving yourself might be what you answer this question as because the last question I had for the day was what words of advice do you have for new developers that are listening to your episode sure it it's okay to fail that's probably the first thing so as long as you learn and grow each time it is okay to fail just try to get better it's also okay to look back and cringe at your previous work everything you know the module changes so much so I you know I've built stuff that is now in service now just out of the box that's going to happen to you and that's okay you're going to look back and say oh that data structure is terrible and you're going to be right but at the time I just know that you were going through it and you were basing your decisions on all of the act the information you had at at that time and that's how you got there another thing that I go through is a lot of times if I see something in somebody else's implementation and I don't know why they made those choices I always assume I I wasn't in the meeting and I didn't hear that business decision or something like that so I try to understand as much as I can before saying this is a tear down and rebuild or anything like that uh it's also okay to ask for help every single day I do that every day I'm asking for help and I'm also saying things like I don't know every single day even at this level even with my experience but I also follow that up by saying if I say I don't know I will tell them I'm going to get that answer and I'll tell you by when so those are the the big things that it's okay to fail it's okay to ask for help and it's okay to say I don't know but make sure you'll say you'll find the answer you stole my recap yeah oh sorry that's all right I'm glad you did it well thank you so much for joining us Christ lots of great information lots to chew on and uh I think we may be fine-tuning the questions in the future there were some dandies in here that I just love the answers and I want to hear more from our other guests but before we let you go can you let the listeners know how they can get in touch with you sure you can find me on LinkedIn just look for the service now magician or you can just type in my name Chris Shu and that last name is spelled s CH uh one more time that's s CH uh and feel free to add me on LinkedIn and we can connect I'm always around to help out anybody that's in the service now ecosystem I looked for the service now Magician on LinkedIn but it disappeared then I waved my hands and it came back [Laughter] amazing thank you so much for joining us Chris and thank you wonderful listener for joining us and putting up with the bad humor today wow this one was a real stink was oh no it was good those were great dad jokes I love them it's hard to find a good one don't forget to check out the other service Now podcast you can find them all at servicenow.com Community under the events menu you can subscribe to this podcast for free and get it automatically delivered to you you'll find that wherever you find your favorite podcasts on the Internet breakpoint is brought to you by service now executive producers are me and Lauren and to find out more about the service now developer program you know where to go it's developer. servicenow.com again thank you so much Chris for joining and sharing with us today oh thank you both for having me I really appreciate please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servicenow.com thanks for listening I think we're all set you ready to go I'm ready when you are let me type something in now oh shoot make sure the little wheels on the cassette are turning yep so I need to go literally grass what's coming up next a lot to get oh sorry go ahead sorry Lauren no no finish your thought go for it could do that all day as long as I didn't have to edit it did the laugh not come through you're the best type of person oh yes that's true yeah I think we got a really good show here hey yeah I think it'll be fine I'm done me too yeah I think so too