If you were choice of heaven why would you ever leave? So why do any of your work outside of ServiceNow the heavenly cloud platform? NOW is the time to make the paradigm shift have your ServiceNow project and implementation teams work only in ServiceNow for development work and project status. Typically, a team of four (4) developers will need to spend more than 10 hours defining and communicating their status per week: (1) to people who do not know Agile and (2) to leadership who dictates a specific status report style in a template in some Microsoft application. This is a $20,000* wasted every year per project team! With that business case before us, we tailored our ServiceNow SDLC application to provide real-time status to any person at any level.
For instance, can you today have a reasonable chance of telling an executive four (4) levels above you why you DO NOT want him to take the best person off your development team tomorrow? No doubt you would struggle to do anything but say "Yes" and worry about re-staffing your team. If you roll up stories to Epics you might be able to actually take on new work that supports the key capabilities of your team. In a recent discussion about using one of my team members on a new project I easily showed that he was leading a Reporting and Analytics team that could take on additional work of that type in our next sprint rather than having him leave the team to do work that only partially included report and analytics development efforts.
Or can your team report status at the lowest level on everything discussed in the Daily Stand Up meeting concerning their stories, tasks, descriptions, acceptance criteria and evidence or documentation of work? By setting up a team, shown in Figure 1, and individual dashboard, as shown in Figure 2, you can inform anyone and any level in the business at any time the current state and value of the work.
- All stories in the current sprint by team member
- Completed and active work by each individual when you drill down on the person
- Completed details for every story
- Tasks that outline the steps taken to complete each story
- Clear descriptions
- Acceptance criteria that covers all use cases and user groups and customer personas
Figure 1 Team Dasbboard
Figure 2 Individual Dashboard
Consider how powerful just the detailed information in the Acceptance Criteria field in a ServiceNow SDLC story can be to communicate value and status. The client can view completed stories and accept the stories throughout the sprint not just at the end of the sprint. This means the client sees continual progress not just at the end of the sprint. At any point the value of the story can be explained right from the live view in ServiceNow. The user of that story gets to see the progressive build of what was done over two (2) weeks and not after months.
Make the value of the team's work even more profound and clear by asking them to provide with each story supporting documentation such as the use case, test scripts, expected test results and a list of Update Sets, Foundation Data, Choice Lists and decisions taken. Now when you do the Daily Stand Up you can expect every person will have more to add to their stories and you can reason with anyone that what your team is doing is important enough to keep the team together. We have a policy for our teams that after your Stand Up you go immediately back into your stories and 1) clarified requirements and add details to what you last wrote in support of your work or 2) if you talked about new things that are not documented anywhere in ServiceNow SDLC create new stories or tasks.
A status that SDLC on its own will not give anyone is visibility to all of the requirements and how they fit into a product roadmap. Projects by nature mean that not everything can be done and those funding the work want to know how long they need to wait to get a full product and how much your work is going to cost. With a visual task board roadmap, as show in Figure 3, of Themes as the product initiatives and Epics as the capabilities being released within each initiative you can show what the customer or executive stakeholder who is funding the work what they are getting and when the work defined so far will be done. This clear message here is visibility to what new work needs funded and the business value it will deliver. If your basis for points, often an hour per point, is communicated all will know the amount of resource time and thus cost is required to deliver the product roadmap over any period of time.
Figure 3 Product Roadmap using ServiceNow Visual Task Board
In conclusion, Agile is a continual over communication of the requirements and buildup of deliverables with the value becoming clearer to the client even during a sprint. No issues, questions or blockers are left unanswered for more than 24 hours with a daily scrum stand up meeting. This means everyone is continually talking and communicating and clear on the current status and you have the information to provide status to any not on the team at any time. In the word case you can screen shot the information in ServiceNow SDLC and cut and paste it into a required format such as PowerPoint saving you and your team of 4 at least $20,000 per year.
*- A very conservation estimate based on $75,000 average burden rate per person, 520 hours per year wasted, $37,50 per hour at 2,000 hours worked per year allowing 10 days off per year for holidays or vacation.
NOTE: MY POSTINGS REFLECT MY OWN VIEWS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, ACCENTURE.
