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

[Rick Forristall]

Thanks Allen for your reply and information.

How do you handle break/fix? bugs? Are these done using the generic request (do these create calls?) that the SD converts to an incident?

How do you handle requests for custom applications? Not just a new catalog item, but a full-blown application to help a department automate some manual processes?

Who manages work assignment and ensuring work gets done, tested and pushed to production?

@Allen A @Michael Fry...

The way I see it there are 4 basic requests for a Snow dev team:

1. Requests for new custom applications built in ServiceNow.

2. Requests for new catalog items.

3. Enhancements to existing catalog items/custom applications.

4. Bug fixes.

Do you see more than that in your world?

How are each of these submitted so the dev team can manage and schedule for work? Numbers below correspond to numbers above:

1. Generic Requests? -> creates a catalog item?

2. Generic Requests? -> creates a catalog item?

3. Agile enhancements -> creates an enhancement record?

4. Submit a "Something's broken" request -> SD converts to incident/defect?

Thanks,

Rick Forristall

[Michael Fry1 · Accepted solution]

We only get:

Requests - Access requests, general requests, etc

Incidents - can't access mostly, some questions.

Enhancements - we don't do custom apps, very rare to get bug issue.

We're a global company with 2 Prod instances. We use an assessment, similar to risk assessment, that determines the Order of enhancements. So far it's worked great.

We review each other's code when changes are made, and we test (as non-admin) along with another Tester, before releasing to submitter to test. I hold a weekly meeting with the managers and demo all new items so they are aware of functionality, etc.

[Rick Forristall]

What a great idea using an assessment to aid in prioritizing enhancement requests! Would you mind offering the sorts of questions you ask and how you score the questions to determine priority? We don’t have a vetting process for requests so I’m going to start assuming that role to protect the other devs on the team and to try and ensure the highest needs of the business are pushed to the top of the list. An assessment like yours would be a nice way to provide some automation to that process. Thanks!!

[Michael Fry1]

Here's our current questions & scoring:

Enhancement Scoring: more Points take highest priority

Department:

IT or Finance = 5

Payroll, HR = 3

Everything else = 1

Reach (OpCo’s/Users affected)

High = 5

Med = 3

Low = 1

Impact (Goals & strategy)

            High = 5

            Med = 3

            Low = 1

Effort (Time Required)

            High = 1

            Med = 3

            Low = 5

Customer Satisfaction/Quality Assurance

            Yes = 7

            No = 3

System Maintenance/Patch/Fix

            Yes = 10

            No = 0

[Rick Forristall]

Thanks again for your ideas.

1. Is the catalog item that creates the enhancement a record producer on the enhancement table?

2. Do you have the assessment questions as variables on the catalog item?

3. Do you do calculations in a before business rule before creating the enhancement?

4. How did you arrive at the questions, choices for those questions and the scores you assign to the choices?

5. For "Reach" do you have those as three options for the user to select (High, Med, Low)? Do you have a helper note to let the submitter understand the meaning of each choice? What is "OpCos"?

6. Same question for Impact - those are the user's choices?

7. For Effort - whose effort? The Development Team or the submitter?

8. Can you help me understand the "Customer Satisfaction/Quality Assurance" question? Who completes that?

Finally, you don't happen to have an update set I can load into my personal developer instance to try out?

Thanks again!

Rick Forristall