The parts of my ServiceNow story you don't see
Paul McNamara · Certified Master Architect · ServiceNow MVP 2024, 2025, 2026 · ServiceNow Platform Owner, Ateko
October 2026
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LEARN OUT LOUD ServiceNow University's campaign asks for the learning, not just the outcome: the wins, the fails and everything in between. Tag #LearnOutLoud and @Servicenow. |
ServiceNow asked the MVPs to create a blog for the “Learn Out Loud” campaign and it has taken me a while to sit down and actually do this. Partly, I think, because the polished version of this story is a lot easier to write than the one below.
If you're a ServiceNow developer in Canada, you might know me, from the SNUGs, to the Developer Meetups, to the things I've shared on LinkedIn about my journey, or maybe you were even a client of PAMT, my ServiceNow consulting partner company, or a client of Ateko, the company I work at today… If you don't know me… buckle up!
Where I started
I graduated from college with a two-year computer programming program, a failed attempt at a website design company, and no response to easily two hundred resumes and job applications. With no money, rent to pay, and food to buy, I went to Kelly Services, a temp agency, and asked for any work they could give me. Pulling files in a file room, data entry, whatever they needed, I was willing. Then I saw a job posting on their internal site for a Staff Administrator (Secretarial Assistant) for the head of the IT department at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Cambridge, Ontario. I had three weeks left in my current absolutely mind-numbing assignment, and Kelly Services said they wouldn't put my name in for the role before it was finished… I went into hyperdrive, and I finished that assignment two weeks early. After that, I started my new role as a contract staff admin for the IT department.
I took every advantage of this opportunity, sticking my nose into things I had no business sticking my nose into. I fixed a SharePoint site; I helped with the HEAT to Assyst migration (if you remember those systems, we can be friends). I started putting extra hours in on the helpdesk. By the end of my three years at Toyota, I was more IT helpdesk than admin assistant, but I was still a contractor. I took a big risk, and I took a fair amount less money (salary, no overtime; I worked a LOT of overtime at Toyota)… I joined an educational software company as a Service Desk worker; I got a job delivering pizza to be able to afford to do that!
Where I built my experience, the foundation of my career
In eight years at that company I worked on EVERYTHING. At first I was imaging computers, fixing incidents, managing changes, dealing with whatever they sent my way. One day we lost three people from a three-person team, the Enterprise Applications team. They were just about to deploy a custom-built web front end for FrontRange HEAT, they managed the custom-built internal time tracking system, they managed the CRM, SharePoint, and the list went on. When I received the email from my boss about their departures, I responded simply “I can do that job…”. In a follow-up discussion I was clearly told, “We can't afford to have your position empty, we will fill it immediately, if you are unsuccessful in the new role, you won't have a job to return to.” Shortly after that, I officially became a Business Applications Developer.
I call this the start of the truly most challenging time in my career… I hadn't done much programming in years, I didn't know the system, and I had multiple show-stopping incidents that needed to be resolved to meet the deadline for the portal rollout, and the time tracking developer had pushed significant change on the way out the door, so the queue of defects was long and ornery. To say I lived at the office would not be an exaggeration.
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SIDEBAR I actually met Angie (the A in PAMT) during that period. We met at a coffee shop; we talked for hours, the conversation was easy, the laughs were plenty, and when we finished up, I got back on the bus and went back to the office to keep working. |
Back to the foundation
The thing about Enterprise Applications in a company that I joined at 98 people and surpassed 900 during my tenure is that it covers EVERYTHING. I was certified in Microsoft products, telephony products, ITSM tools. I worked with HR, Sales, IT, Development, QA, PMO. I got an education that you couldn't buy while working at this company, all while having no idea what it would do for my life. Eventually I was leading the Enterprise Applications team: the apps we acquired, the ones we built, every single application that ran the business side of the company.
The turning point
We hired a consulting company to implement ServiceNow, which at the time was a pre-IPO company competing with Remedy, HP, Oracle and other legacy systems. It was a platform that you could literally build anything on; our use case was customer service (years before CSM existed as a product) and the consulting company extended the ITSM application to achieve our business objectives. About two weeks before “go-live” I decided to do a little playing with the new system. I uncovered numerous issues, the most significant being the ability for one customer to see another customer's data. The consulting company resisted our demands for change, so we let them go and my team and I made all of the necessary changes and got the system live on time.
For the next 12 to 18 months I became more and more enamoured with ServiceNow. When a request to expand my team was denied, I resigned. We had all been working so much more than our forty hours a week, and there was no end in sight. I contacted the consulting company that we had parted ways with, and somehow secured my first job as a consultant.
The first project
A system for underwriters, consolidating the work tasks from seven legacy systems into a case management system built in ServiceNow, designed by people with CRM experience but no ServiceNow experience. I worked so many hours, learned so many things, never let the system beat me, always found a way, and established myself as one of the hardest-working consultants on our team. I billed about 2,800 hours my first full year with that company.
I made mistakes. I built things that today’s version of myself would admonish a junior for building… the crazy scripted ACLs required to make the ed-tech company’s access controls work, the routing table with over nine thousand entries for the underwriting case management… I stretched the capabilities of the platform in ways few today would even think about doing (and if they did it would certainly be considered technical debt). Funny thing though, last I checked that system is still running, has survived dozens of upgrades, and though it has been enhanced and improved over the years, there are many components that still have my name on them!
I went on to work on many projects with that company, learning more about the ServiceNow platform than I could possibly remember today. I worked there for three years until they were acquired and I decided to go independent and do my own thing.
PAMT: one laptop to sixty consultants
It started out as an idea to be an independent contractor. It turned into nine years of my life, building a boutique ServiceNow partner that focused on its people, its clients, and delivering the best outcomes we could. For the first five years it grew slowly. I wasn’t trying to build a business, I was trying to pay the bills and take care of our clients.
Then I had a life-impacting medical event that left me wondering whether I would have done enough had I not survived it. I decided to change our strategy and started to hire every talented person I could find… if you build it, they will come. We added the team and the client list grew. We went from five people that year to doubling each of the next three years: ten, twenty, forty. We became a ServiceNow partner, not just a small consultancy outside the ecosystem. At our peak we were just over fifty employees, with another dozen independent consultants pushing the total past sixty. I’m told our reputation was good. I know our clients liked us. I always planned to take it much further.
Not being a business person by education or experience, I made mistakes. We won our largest RFP and I immediately staffed the team… it took over six months to sign and nearly nine to get paid… that cash-flow crisis nearly broke us. A hard lesson, and one that may come in handy in the future: truly understand your cash flow, the risk of overextending, and that a win isn’t always a benefit immediately.
Then an opportunity presented itself that my family couldn’t possibly turn down. In August 2025, PAMT was acquired by Ateko, and I went from one of sixty to one of a thousand, now over two thousand Ateko team members worldwide, backed by Bell Canada, one of the oldest and best-known companies in Canada. The adventures today are similar to those at PAMT, just at a much, much larger scale.
Where I’ve failed
If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen the pattern: finishing an assignment two weeks early, living at the office, 2,800 billable hours in a year. I told those stories as wins, and some of them were. They were also a habit and habits don’t just stay at the office.
This part was tough to write. From a ServiceNow perspective, even a business perspective, there are things I could have and should have done better, and mistakes I learned from. But I struggle to come up with one more significant than this, and though it’s personal, I think it is worth sharing. I didn’t handle the stress of it all well. I put my priorities into my career, the business, and other places that had their benefits but are not the most important things.
The person I became when the workday was done, when I needed to shut down my brain for the night, when I needed to “relax”, he wasn’t a good guy. It cost me the most important things. It cost me the wife who supported my decisions, tolerated the workaholic, gave me two beautiful children. The woman who built our company culture, was loved by everyone on our team, who did everything to help us succeed for as long as she could.
Until she couldn’t.
As I write this, on October 26th, 2026, I am four hundred days sober. The number is a success. That it took me so long to start is the failure, and of everything in this post, it is the lesson I most want someone else to learn much earlier than I did.
Becoming a beginner again
This year I took on the challenge of working with AI: not for my own productivity alone, but to accelerate ServiceNow delivery for an entire ServiceNow practice. For the first few months I was once again the person searching the community because I didn’t have the answers. I’ve been an architect on this platform for years, but felt like I was seeing everything again as if it was new. One wrong turn could have disastrous results, and to be honest it is still a work in progress. The ServiceNow side of things was the easy part. The pace of change, the variety of options, and the harder question of what actually makes a whole practice faster rather than just busier are not. It’s exciting, it’s invigorating, and the possibilities are endless.
Who helped
Brett Emerton, the manager who took a chance on me and let me try to be a business applications developer. Angie, who let me leave a stable job, with a mortgage and young children, to build my own thing. Glen Chiasson, PAMT’s first hire, who took a chance on a one-person company. The Big Four consulting company that became our first client, and every partner and client since who put their trust in me to do the job
The achievements, and what they’re not
I’m proud to be a CMA. The journey was challenging; I failed my first attempt at the board, and the lessons from that failure were worth more than the pass. I walked in with confidence, perhaps even hubris, but I was not ready; I was not sufficiently prepared. On my second attempt I reached out to the community for help, and I received it in spades. I must have practiced with a dozen CMAs preparing for that second attempt; we truly have the BEST community! Thankfully the second attempt was a success.
I’m also very proud of being a three-time ServiceNow Community MVP. From the start of my career I’ve tried to build community: starting our local SNUG, then the Developer Meetup, building a partner, staying involved. Finally, it isn’t a badge, but I’m also proud to be one of the people who took a risk and built their own small piece of the ServiceNow ecosystem, something our employees, our clients and eventually an acquirer saw real value in.
These achievements are evidence that I’ve learned a thing or two, and I try to share what I have learned. They are not evidence that I’m finished. If you’re at chapter one and you see someone with the MVP badge, or the CMA badge, don’t compare your chapter one with their chapter ten… this is your journey, take what you can from others and build your own path. Learn, start building something today that you don’t fully understand, try to understand it by the time you’ve finished, help someone who hasn’t yet got to where you are.
Share what you’ve learned, out loud.
#LearnOutLoud
