| View this email in your browser Starting on the Right Foot In the early days of ServiceNow, almost nobody had experience managing instances, controlling migration quality, and managing multiple vendors. Each customer relied on one or two vendors to tell them the best way. There is a new reality today. - Most customers have years of experience in product management.- The body of best practice knowledge for managing build & migration has grown significantly.- Most customers will need to interface with MANY vendors. So today I'd like to talk about starting implementations, consulting services, and app installs on the right foot. Hopefully it will be helpful to indie consultants, young partners, and customers. If you're a partner (especially a technology partner) share this with your sales team and smooth the transition from sales to services. VENDOR ONBOARDING PROCESSES Many customers will have a package of documents, agreements, and education to be performed by any resource that will actually be touching assets (including ServiceNow). The sooner you get on top of this the better. The prime stakeholder is often disconnected from this process, so there's natural tension. The stakeholder desire to start may outpace the speed of the process. I recommend asking for this as soon as the sale closes & before it even transitions to professional services. TASK REQUIREMENTS Everyone should be tracking requirements and work towards completion in *some system*, that's just a no-brainer. However some customers can require the use of their systems to cover the requisite tasks. You could be working on anything from project tasks to stories, but you've got to prepare to do it the customer's way. This may come as a shock to young but well organized partners as it may result in two systems of record. ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT STANDARDSOne of my proudest achievements was leaving my freelance architecture clients with Architecture and Development standards they could use as a form of quality control. It was VERY difficult getting services partners to follow them though. Be a *good* services partner and ask for existing architecture & dev standards before a services engagement. At best, you learn some good practices and build for a happy customer. At worst, you teach the customer better standards to integrate into their framework. As some of these standards may involve doing things "the long and careful way", you'll want this info before you write a hard scope of work.I do anticipate this will be easier for all parties as more customers adopt the Instance Scan feature. No need to hope for compliance from a services partner when Instance Scan can enforce in near real time! If you're a ServiceNow customer and want a good source of architecture advice, check out the CJ & The Duke podcast. DELEGATED DEVELOPMENT Larger ServiceNow customers may be using the Delegated Development functionality, so it pays to have at least one person on your team familiar with that. MINIMUM ROLE REQUIREMENTS Not all work requires Admin. Sure, it makes things "easier", but it always carries risk. Put some careful consideration into the type of deployments you do and inform your customers of the *minimum* role package you'll need on their instances. If you're a safety and architecture focused product owner, consider asking your vendors for this. This section goes double for apps hosted on the ServiceNow store. As an example, VividCharts doesn't require admin to build, and we don't ask for it. We ask for the associated vividcharts roles, and sp_admin. INSTANCE MIGRATION PATH It's *very* important to ask this up front as it can add significant time to an engagement. You can also make a mess of an instance if you just assume Dev -> Test -> Prod. Why might you make that assumption? Here's a straw poll I did a while back. See how most people voted Dev -> Test -> Prod? Did you know that's NOT ServiceNow's official methodology?Now consider many customers only have a Dev and a Prod instance. Also consider, larger environments with specialized compliance interests (like pharma) may have even more instances on the path to production. Questions:- What instance is primary development in?- Do you have a sandbox instance for experimentation?- What order of instances does code have to migrate through?- Who executes the update sets on each instance? UPDATE SETS Want to ruin a customer ServiceNow architect's day? Be that team who creates their own update sets with their own naming convention and use merge and whatever other practices you want. LEARN how your customer prefers their update sets. OBEY their naming convention.UNDERSTAND specific nuances. At minimum, determine officially who's allowed to create update sets and what if any conventions exist. Do this before build starts. Questions:- Who is allowed to create an update set?- What is the update set naming convention?- What Instances do update sets migrate through (you should have this already though)?- Do you allow merging or batching of update sets?- Do you have any custom fields or customizations to your update set functionality? CLONE BACKS There's no feeling so foul as doing some hard dev work that gets nuked from orbit because someone did a clone back you weren't expecting.I'm not ashamed to say its happened to me. I've been in positions where I've lost over a week of solid work. Learn from my mistakes: ask for the formal clone back schedule before you even start services. Questions:- Do you have a regularly scheduled clone back?- Are Clone Back intervals absolute, or depend on ongoing development?- Do you allow exports of update sets mid-development to facilitate clonebacks? PROCESS CEREMONIES & ARTIFACTS Some customers have more involved change processes than others. For some, it can be a *VERY* labor intensive process, so you'll have a "preparation multiplier" on your deployment time. Others are so unstructured you can win points educating good change management practices. Key is, you want to spot the harder processes earlier so you can compensate with scope. Don't sleep on this one folks. I've been in situations where you get one shot at a design/code change every month or two. Missing that can sour whole implementations. Again, determine this before the engagement starts so you can plan accordingly. Questions to ask here:- What documents do we need to move between each instance?- Who must prepare those documents?- Who represents those documents at which ceremonies?- What is the minimum lead time needed for each document and ceremony. Did You Enjoy This Content? Taking my content survey helps me navigate what to create.If you'd like to sponsor my content, reply to this message for options & rates. If you get tremendous value, consider a donation. If not, I still greatly appreciate your readership. VICTORY through superior design and story telling friends. I remain yours truly, Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. |
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This email was sent to <> why did I get this? unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences Robert Fedoruk · 5215 W Winona St · Chicago, IL 60630-2238 · USA