Blog Post #1 — Our plan for planning, selecting an Agile tool, and setting up the PMO

[kellykaufmann]

Well, it's "T minus 1" you could say for getting started with planning for our ServiceNow project. We fit the picture of those memes that mock corporate America's planning discussions for planning sessions to actually do something. But in our role, we know this orchestration is necessary. We're one week away from our planning-palooza, and the team is really excited. Read one for where we stand:

Planning Sessions:

Our partner AOS gave us an agenda & timeline for the discussions they will lead us in next Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday (there is a department meeting on Tuesday). Here's our schedule of discussions, and the number of confirmed attendees for each session:

Mon	Wed	Wed	Wed	Thu	Thu	Thu
9am-5pm	8am-9am	9:15am-4pm	4:15pm-5pm	8am-11:30am	1pm-2pm	3pm-4pm
Assessment	Base Config	Incident Mgmt	Problem Mgmt	Service Catalog	Self-Service Portal	Assessment Summary
10	10	21	18	18	11	10

We will first confirm which modules will be implemented in which phases and then start diving into our first phase modules. At this point we think we will implement Incident Mgmt, Problem Mgmt, Service Catalog & Self Service in our first phase — but that won't be confirmed until Monday's discussion. I felt like our proposed implementation order was validated by all the other customers I met at Knowledge 14 that implemented in this order. Monday's session will consist of the 7 IT directors, myself, our SN admin, and the SVP of IT. There are clearly a lot of attendees for the Incident Management, Problem Management , and Service Catalog sessions. Which gets back to my pain-point of planning events. We never did find that 'perfect' meeting space for Wednesday which meets all our criteria. We reserved an inexpensive offsite location that has everything but a phone for us. Phone lines in houses was the norm in the early 1900 (I Googled it), but apparently we can't get one at this location.   We're looking into creative solutions. Ugh, event planning.

I organized a meeting for next Tuesday with our SN admin (who lives in Cali but will be here in St Louis next week) and the SN admin at my previous employer here in St Louis. I'm hoping they will forge a professional relationship of support and mentorship.

Selecting Agile Tools:

My employer has not yet selected a tool to manage Agile efforts. We want to use ServiceNow so we can have one view of all efforts in one repository, can leverage resource planning, etc, but we need to make sure SN has the functionality we need. I reached out to Ryan at SN and asked if he knows a customer willing to do a demo, and also reached out to someone I met at the Knowledge 14 conference, asking if they will do a demo. I found a lab guide from Knowledge 14 and will go through that with our SCRUM Master so she can get a feel for how this works in SN. I also need to demonstrate to one of the managers SN's ability to help plan the backlog and visuals of what efforts are being worked on right now and where they stand — I'll start getting that demo together as well.

Setting up the PMO & PPM:

We will define the waterfall methodology phases, project request and approval flow, project types, etc. just a step ahead of us setting up these fields in ServiceNow. I'm documenting in a RAAID log the decisions we need to make. Here's the columns from that log:

Decision ID#

SN Module

Decision Needed, Options, Impact

Date Decision Needed

Urgency (Select from dropdown)

Status (select from dropdown)

Date Entered

Decision Maker Name

Decision Solicitation & Communication Approach

Information/ Documentation Needed For Decision (optional)

Recommended Solution (optional)

Actual Decision Made

Who Made Decision

Date of Decision

Impact of Decision Made (Scope/ Schedule/Cost)

Stakeholders of Decision Made

Communication Plan to Stakeholders

Communication Status (select from dropdown)

Comments

I'm also drawing out on paper the screens for the Project module in SN, and as we make decisions am writing out what items will populate each dropdown menu. I will then give this to our SN Admin for her to start building. I need to figure out when she will be given the 'green light' to start setting this up, and in what environment (should it be in our development env't in case she messes something up?), and the process for having AOS validate her changes.

So, for now, it's just "sit and wait" until our planning sessions next week.