ServiceNow Development Process

[Rick Forristall]

I have a process question for fellow #ServiceNow developers. 

How do you manage your ServiceNow development cycle from request to completion? 

In ServiceNow using the Agile process? Epics > Stories, etc?

Using SCRUM or Kanban-style board?

If so, how do you show incidents on your boards -- do you take submitted incidents and create stories for them? 

Do you have demand management set up in ServiceNow and use it? 

Do you have people in your company email you directly with requests for enhancements or new ServiceNow custom apps/projects? 

I'm trying to think of an effective, easy way to be able to manage all our ServiceNow developments needs (bugs, enhancements, new project requests, etc) and I'm curious how other Snow dev teams are managing their process. 

For developers on teams in a Snow customer company: how does your team managing its dev process? 

For Snow partners: how have you seen your clients' dev teams handle this? 

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Rick Forristall
Sr. ServiceNow Developer
Freedom Financial Network

[Michael Fry1]

Going through implementations we used Sprints & Stories but still go-live, we switched strictly to Enhancements. ITIL users can submit new enhancement requests via catalog item. Just because they requested it, doesn't mean we're going to do it.

We just added an assessment to help identify which enhancements come first, since we have so many different departments using the platform.

[Rick Forristall]

Thanks Michael,

How do you manage the open items? Do you use a kanban-type board (Snow's Visual Task Boards, Trello, etc?).

For the enhancements, I'm assuming these catalog items created catalog tasks for the development team? 

If so, did/do you convert to stories or simply work with the catalog task? In either case, are these added to a backlog and managed with all other outstanding requests?

Thanks again,

Rick Forristall

[Michael Fry1]

Of course we get Incidents & Requests, plus a few other odds and ends but for the most part we manage the whole process via Enhancements. We added the Opened by to the notifications and added a watch list so others could be alerted too.

The Enhancement catalog items created enhancements, no catalog tasks. We don't use Sprints/Stories now. Bugs/issues could be reported as an Incident, but if it requires more dev time, testing, and a Change, we might convert the Incident to an enhancement. Yes all enhancements requiring code changes go through Change Mgmt. Hot Fixes can be applied w/o a Change

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Yea, we flow along these same lines as well. We have a catalog item for requesting a brand new catalog item be built and require a full workflow and requirements/acceptance criteria before our process team and BA's reach out for further information. We have an enhancement catalog item as well to intake those types of requests. We use Agile for stories, etc. At my current company we just went live with Demand so that's a work in progress, but ideally that's where it would go first for triage, currently not.

I'd highly recommend making catalog items like we've done. There is also a "generic request" that we have built that allows for our Service Desk to expedite an urgent request by first creating a core task that is assigned to our process team (similar to the service catalog item request or enhancement request) but allows the SD to also create a manual task that is assigned directly to the team that needs to work on the issue right now. Then the process team goes through and reviews all the generic requests for possibly dev work etc. So essentially there's 3 of those "misc" type catalog items that's used to capture information.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!