Service Now Implementation Specialist certification in IT Service Management - personal experience

[Nailia]

As the recent post in social job network gained some feedback, I thought I would share the way I was preparing for the exam. 

As all of you know already, ServiceNow had adjusted their certification system, to make sure that each stream of implementation is covered separately. If I understand correctly, up until 31st of March 2018 it is possible to recertify if you had previously accomplished the CIS exam's first version.

While previous exam was more based on concepts and basic knowledge of more advanced tools within service now, the new version is testing your knowledge of the particular features of the applications you are certifing into. Hence, ITSM space, as blueprint suggests, is challenging your understanding of core ITSM applications: Incident, Problem, Change, Request, as well as CMDB and Knowledge.

My plan was fairly simple as I didn't have an opportunity to pay for the course:

1. Examine the blueprint

2. Examine the core modules in personal developer instance

Right after reading the sample questions in the blueprint, I realized that I won't be able to pass the exam right away as all of the questions were so specifically concentrated on base behavior of freshly installed system. I was always working on heavily customized instances, hence question of "What will be copied to child incident when parent gets updated with assignment group, configuration item and worknotes?" was bringing a bit of  shop to me.

I spent 2 weeks preparing for the certification,around 2 hours per day, and that was my plan:

Days 1-3: reading docs.service-now.com, Kingston, IT Service Management space, concentrating on IM and Change management

Days 4-5: using the developer instance. Creating incidents, problems, changes, requests; configuring the catalog items and record producers

Days 6-7: reading about Knowledge base and using Knowledge base in developer instance

Days 8-11: examining all of the ACLs, UI Actions, Script includes related to incident, change_request, problem, sc_cat_item tables

Days 12-13: examining the service catalog throughly, especially the variables (as i got them questions in the new version of admin exam!)

Day 14: re-reading the docs.service-now.com

I would recommend you to remember the sys_access_control_role table entries in terms of which operation is allowed for which role for the core ITSM tables, definitely go through the UI actions on each of the tables remembering the conditions and whether the script is utilizing the script includes or has the script simply written there.

During the exam, I have noticed that there were quite a lot of questions that were knowledge related, hence I sincerely recommend you to study all the UI actions and business rules which aid in creation of the knowledge.

With regards to the processes, I would say that it is enough to study the Process section on the docs.service-now.com dedicated for each process and use your common sense.

Despite the percentage provided on the blueprint, I would say I received the most amount of questions towards the Change and Problem process, and minor amount of questions regarding the Incident.

Overall, if you are are an admin/implementer of ServiceNow with some solid experience, even with a little base configuration system, a week of intense recapitalizing of the knowledge will definitely help.

Good luck!