Technical Review Boards for Mid-size Companies

[Chris Pearson]

If you find yourself tasked as the owner of the ServiceNow platform at your company, or the lead architect or developer and you're not wearing ALL of those hats at the same time, congratulations! You might be employed at a mid-size company! With a small-ish team in place to govern the technical aspects of your ServiceNow investment, things can become a little more formal.

Ensure that you stay connected with your business analysts and development teams gathering requirements and writing stories. These are the front lines of defense and they need to understand the overall goals of proper technical governance.

These goals are the same whether you're a one-person show or if you have a team of architects at your disposal:

• Protect the strategic value of your ServiceNow investment by maintaining an 'out of the box - first approach' to solving business problems.
• Enforce architectural standards, ServiceNow application design and coding best practices
• Minimize changes to out of the box code in the platform to ensure future upgrades of the platform are measured in days and weeks instead of months.

Stand up a recurring meeting on a cadence which makes sense for your organization. Empower your BAs and Devs to flag requirements or stories which fit your definition of a 'custom design' which needs review. Create an avenue for the business to plead their case and also for platform architects to weigh in, then decide if the addition of technical debt is worth the business outcomes achieved by designing and maintaining it going forward.

Establish some standard sizing and risk attributes around the measurement of customization requests. This allows you to be fair when evaluating many customization requests over time. Create a template for the types of information which weigh into the decision making process and then track these requests over time so you can look back and review how many you're processing and how many are being approved or denied. Track which parts of the business are requesting the most customizations.

Hint: If you have a couple of sharp developers in-house, maybe you could take this post, and with a little polish, ask them to build you a custom application in ServiceNow which could be used to execute the technical governance of the platform.

Remember, not all customization is bad in ServiceNow. If it is designed well, serves an important purpose to the business, and is able to be supported in-house by your dev team without too much effort, the value to the business might outweigh the cost of the technical debt. Setting up a way to request, track, decide and report on platform customizations will go a long way towards properly governing and therefore protecting your ServiceNow investment.