So far we have cleaned up our production environment, we have a development environment that everybody is busily using to put their great visions together, and we have quality control in place to manage and maintain a robust and professional environment. What's left? Well, who is going to do all of this? How are they going to do it? Who gets to do what? This is where implementing your Performance Analytics users and on-boarding them correctly play a huge role in your organization's success. It is critical to first understand how roles in Performance Analytics work, Vincent Loffeld wrote an overview in "Do you know your Performance Analytics Role?".
Once you have a good understanding of how roles are aligned in PA, and you have an understanding of your own team; where everyone's strengths are, what needs to be managed (keeping things clean, managing quality), it is then time to assign roles to the team.
ServiceNow's strategy for implementing user roles in Performance Analytics:
Our strategy for assigning roles in the production environment was all about control. We have 3 different types of users.
- Limited Admins
- We have three PA admins at ServiceNow, one primary admin and two back-up admins. All three have both the pa_admin & pa_data_collector roles. The team stays in constant communication and ensures that no work is done in a silo.
- Controlled Power Users
- After our initial launch, we had some folks test-driving PA. We have since reigned that in and have designated only four power users with access to production. They are in constant communication with the admins and cannot create sources so it is easy to manage this small group. These members were granted access to production because they are heavily relied on for constant analysis in a rapid changing environment and are very capable of using the tool.
- Viewers
- All employees that have the ITIL user role here at ServiceNow are also granted the pa_viewer role. (This means that all employees can see all dashboards, if there is a need to secure a dashboard, access can be granted at the role/group level on the actual dashboard.)
Note: We are currently only using the pa_admin, pa_data_collector, pa_power_user and pa_view roles at this time.
In our development environment, where all testing is done prior to roll out on production, we keep it simple with two types of users. Since this is for testing, there is not a reason to have all of ServiceNow be able to view what is going on.
- Limited Admins
- We have maintained the same model on the development environment as we have on the production environment with only having three PA admins; one primary admin and two back-up admins. This is to ensure that the controls we have put in place remain in place in both our sub-prod and prod environments. Note: The admins on this machine have an extra responsibility in that they are also platform admins and grant role requests for all users needing access to PA.
- Power Users
- All requests for the power_user role will be granted on this machine only (barring the rare exception as noted above). Specific criteria must be met (see below) in order for access to be granted. All access requests are managed by the PA Admin team.
ServiceNow's strategy for On-boarding our new users in Performance Analytics:
As we have stated before, there is so much that can be done with PA. People are eager to get their hands on it and dig in! HOLD UP! Even though we have a development environment, you still need to know what you are doing. You should not just start willy-nilly changing, adding or altering things in a development environment just because it is not live yet.
A development environment is a great place to..
- test a theory
- try a proof of concept
- determine which visualizations meet your needs
Your Performance Analytics development environment should not be the place for people to "learn & burn." It wouldn't be wise to treat it as a place for newbies to
teach themselves as that could lead to a lot of wasted time and effort to clean up your development environment. People should have an understanding of all the
intricacies of the tool and understand proper process and procedures.
Requirements for access to PA Development Environment:
- Users must have a formal training (classroom is preferred or one-on-one training is acceptable is certain situations)
- Users must read and follow all rules established in documented Knowledge Base articles (naming conventions, how to create a dashboard, etc.)
Note: Access will be denied if this criteria is not met and access will be removed if compliance is not met for current users.
I hope this has been helpful as you launch into the world of managing your PA environment. For the first step in our PA revamp mission, see Performance Analytics at ServiceNow: Cleaning House. For the second step ServiceNow took to formalize our process see Performance Analytics at ServiceNow: Development Environment. Finally, for the step we took prior to implementing user and onboard, see Performance Analytics at ServiceNow: Quality Control.
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