Now Learning Blog – So you want to be a ServiceNow Architect Part 3

[Julie7]

Industry Best Practices and Core Competencies for a ServiceNow Architect

The first and second blog in this series covered the essential and recommended courses required to become a ServiceNow Architect.  It is important to remember, it is not enough to just complete course work for becoming a ServiceNow Architect, there are core technical competencies that can be achieved through completion of ServiceNow training, but knowledge of industry best practices and daily practice using the ServiceNow platform and products is also very important.

In this third blog, we will be covering industry best practices and core competencies that complete a well-rounded ServiceNow Architect’s training.

Service Design and Delivery Best Practices

Anyone that wants to be a ServiceNow Architect should be well versed in the following commonly leveraged methods for digitally transforming the way work is designed, developed, and delivered:

• ITIL practices, the most widely used approach to IT Service Management, which along with VeriSM service management principles for creating desired business outcomes, help us understand that everything is a service and services can be constantly refined and improved.
• Agile development, a way of thinking about managing projects and resources related to the development and delivery of the services we design, based on the values and principles expressed in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the 12 Principles behind it.  An architect must understand when to leverage these different practices. 
• Blending and blurring the lines between the distinctions of Development and Operational is the realm of CI/CD, continuous integration and delivery practices that enable application development teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably and DevOps – According to one of ServiceNow’s Technical Trainers, “There are some great class resources out there (ITSM Academy is one that comes to mind, as are any of Gene Kim’s books), I think just about any googled search can yield broad concepts of DevOps and its implications for Architecture.”

Other general industry frameworks that are extremely useful from an architectural/consultancy perspective include the following:

• Organizational Change Management – Our trainer recommends PROSCI’s Enterprise Change Management boot camp, saying, “It doesn’t matter how beautifully you architect the solution if no one ends up adopting it.”
• Human Centered Design – Our trainer comments, “speaking of users… if you’re only looking at requirements and building the most obvious thing, perhaps you’re missing the bigger picture or unintentionally feeding into the problem.  HCD helps people get out of their own heads and creatively solve problems with solutions that better match up to the needs of users.  There are four core principals to HCD: focus on the people involved, find and focus on the right problem, think about everything as a system, test everything.”
• Presenting Work With Confidence – Recommended by our trainer who adds, “Many of the technical folks asking me about the architect route seem to be good technically, but sometimes struggle presenting their ideas/themselves in a way that helps them get their message across in a compelling and easy to digest package.  This is a one-day workshop that is a great for folks making the transition from purely technical to client-facing.”

Other Resources

Applied context and daily practice are crucial to an architectural understanding, and therefore any self-managed, collaborative, and self-guided work will help develop as a ServiceNow Architect. In addition to daily use of the platform and applications and practice of industry-standard principles, also consider these resources for additional help:

• Simulators are a great resource that can work for individuals or teams to get real-world hand’s on practice with the ServiceNow environment.
• Internal communities or working groups where you can share things like application build ideas, weekly presentations of lessons learned, etc.  Check the ServiceNow Community regularly.

Designing for Function as well as Form 

In addition to understanding and utilizing sound business process principles to build out solutions, ultimately architects must also understand how to create solutions that deliver functionality that lives up to the promise of their designs. Grand processes and perfect solutions are meaningless if they do not properly scale or if they are unable to be maintained after the solution is delivered.  Architects must master the technical aspects of performance tuning, ensuring that the solution they present is efficient which means understanding how best to leverage server resources including memory, transactions, database usage, and table hierarchies and also client resources like network overhead and how best to utilize client scripting. 

In order to master those skills, an architect should know where to look to troubleshoot and parse through diagnostic data from XMLStats and the various Slow Pattern Metrics, better still, be able to help a customer learn to see troubling signs before they become critical via the various self-monitoring systems within the platform. 

Architects should be able to confidently guide customers through discussions related to integrations with other systems and how best to make use of the data from those sources.  The choices made when customizing various aspects of the platform involve some level of technical debt that must be observed each upgrade and can have potential impacts on performance and ease of upgrade.  One must not be afraid to make these choices but also be able to properly describe the costs when weighing any potential benefits.

What’s Next?

Whether you are just getting started on your journey to becoming a ServiceNow Architect, or well on your way, I hope you have found these blogs filled with helpful advice.  Keep checking back for announcements on the official curriculum for ServiceNow Architects with a release date of Q3 2020. The learning path will be made available in Now Learning, and appropriate announcements made internally and through the Partner Portal.