Kelly's SN implementation Blog Post #14

[kellykaufmann]

Kelly's SN implementation Blog Post #14

This blog post rolls across a few weeks, with a lot happening over these weeks!

SDLC

We got our burndown chart set up so Story pulls the 'Remaining Hours' of all the Scrum Tasks related to it, which will roll up into the Scrum. But the burndown chart wasn't updating for our Scrum Master like it was for our SN Admin. We figured out 'draft' Story points aren't included in the chart, so we need to progress the Story beyond Draft for the points/hours to be included. But even after recognizing this, were still missing a factor because the chart just wasn't updating right for our Scrum Master. Ends up we needed to save/update the Story after updating the hours in the Scrum Task. So our SN Admin wrote a script to have the Story automatically 'Save' when a task's hours are updated. But this meant it would now count the points of Stories in in 'draft' form - we decided we were fine with that for the time being.

Our Scrum Masters remained frustrated that we have to do extra administrative steps to tie everything to a Product, even though our organization doesn't work to Products. By chance, when digging into documentation for Fuji PPM functionality, via a clarification question on Scrum tasks that I posted to the SN Community,   I found out that SDLC functionality in Project Workbench in Project doesn't have to have everything tied to a Product. Woohoo! This changes EVERYTHING for us! So, I spoke with our teams about upgrading to Fuji - as it's a perfect time for us to upgrade since we're between project phases - so we decided upgrade Dev to Fuji the next week.

I started a Project how-to doc, but put that on hold until after the upgrade. A SDLC doc hasn't been started yet since we need to see where we go with using SDLC functionality in Project Workbench in project. Or maybe if we are using Project Workbench for Agile, both teams would use one how-to doc?

The Upgrade to Fuji:

So, we had a big 'oops'. We were supposed to just upgrade Dev to Fuji but we accidentally upgraded both Dev & Prod to Fuji. This, in addition to the fact that we did not yet have full documentation on SDLC yet, created problems. We could not compare screens between Dev & Prod (we only have 2 environments) to see what fields changed. We could not look at SDLC documentation to see if anything looked different / was missing, since we haven't created that documentation yet! We had to rely on the SDLC Test Scripts & Requirements but of course there were many "I SWEAR we used to be able to create a timesheet here by simply clicking on x!" moments. And these "I SWEAR" moments were valid - some fields that were on the form pre-upgrade were no longer there. Here is a SN Community Post about things that changed / went wrong for us in Fuji. A lot of confusion was caused by different 'Views'. For example, when opening a task from GANTT, all our project task fields weren't showing on the form. Ends up GANTT tasks were in one 'View' and pulling up tasks from the Project form would pull up in a different 'View'. We didn't want to have to maintain several 'Views' so we decided to set up one complete 'View' and force this view on everyone. It took us a good two weeks to test & get everything back to normal.

Another Oopsie:
While we're on the topic of oopsies… we had another one recently. We had enabled some PPM functionality (can't figure out specifically what was the trigger) in Dev & Prod, and in doing so we apparently had the option of pulling in Demo data with that (now we know that's an option!). But one day there were a ton of Projects & Demands in our Prod instance that we hadn't created. We saw a SN name for who created those records, so we assumed the culprit was one of the 2 people SN who was in our environment helping with HI tickets & helping figure a few things out for us. We got cranky, we escalated, and found out it was our doing. Sorry, ServiceNow! We then had to apologize & dig around for the hundreds of demo records that were created in our Prod instance & get rid of them. It took us 2 weeks to find everything. It was a bigger deal than you might think, having all this false data in the system. And anyone who knows me knows that I like clean databases.

Project Workbench:

I spent a good week figuring out how Project Workbench works in general & for SDLC. As I figured it out, I updated my Project guide & shared that with our Scrum Master. After realizing it has all the functionality we need while also no longer requiring everything to be tied to a Product, we decided that we will use the SDLC functionality in Project Workbench in Project, and not use the SDLC module at all. So now we're having our   Internal SN Admin set up Project Workbench SDLC views to be the same as the SDLC module views (so the Story form in Project looks the same as the Story form in SDLC, etc.). Then to finish up the documentation & do project training!