Technical Review Boards for Small Companies

[Chris Pearson]

Small companies are often asked to do more with less. It's nearly a guarantee that you'll end up wearing multiple hats and if one of those hats has a label of ServiceNow architect, Lead Developer or Platform Owner, this post is for you. You very well may be the first and last line of defense charged with protecting your ServiceNow instance from unnecessary customization and over configuration. This is an important role and it's up to you. The Star Wars quote comes to mind (IYKYK).

The goal is 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.

In order to accomplish this in a small organization, you must engage with your teams that are in the trenches, gathering requirements, writing development stories, and approving designs. This goes for any steady-state teams that are 'keeping the lights on' as well as any larger projects which are rolling out new capabilities. Ensuring that you have the support of executives sitting in the C-suite goes a long way towards getting all teams to align to the above goals.

While some of these discussions might be contentious, you must be willing to spend some political capital at the right times and defend the ServiceNow instance when appropriate. In short, you must be willing to say 'no' at times. An exceptional platform owner/architect/multiple-hat-wearer will be able to say 'no...but...' and come up with an alternative way to approach solving the business problem in a less customized way in ServiceNow. These can be difficult conversations, but they are worth having. ServiceNow can be a very powerful platform to shape your digital transformation program. Properly protecting it is too costly to avoid.