Kelly's SN implementation Blog Post #3

[kellykaufmann]

This week on our SN implementation has been primarily comprised of taking care of random side-needs & getting planning moving. There are all these little things a SN project manager probably couldn't imagine popping up and taking up 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there every day throughout the week at the beginning of the project. And then there is my oh-so-favorite task of scheduling a ton of meetings on busy people's calendars. Here's some of the bigger updates:

SN Instance Version: We got an email from SN saying our org has been given the green light to start playing around in Eureka. I need to get us a third environment! I keep nagging in as friendly a manner as I can. Perhaps I'll ask the team next week if they want to go ahead & upgrade to Eureka now since we haven't gone live with anything yet.

Web Address Change: I got an account set up to submit a request for the web address change. Good timing — hopefully we'll have the new web address (which means a refresh on our environment) by the time AOS is ready to kick off the project. I submitted the request & SN got back to me, it looks like this will be finished before AOS gets back.

Decision Meetings: I organized   & scheduled all of the 'decision' meetings (this is from all the remaining 'decisions' captured in the requirement sessions) that will take place over the next couple of weeks, and left a couple for AOS to lead. Our organization wants to improve our processes, and we don't have our processes documented, so this is going to take considerable time for everyone to communicate how things should be done. I did this in consulting, creating 'current state' process flows and 'future state' process flows, and know the importance of documenting the future process well & communicating it well so everyone is on the same page. I don't think our team realizes how much discussion & time this is going to take. We'll try doing what we can without the expertise of our consultants in the room. The plan is, when AOS returns in a few weeks, to review with them the processes & decisions made, and for them to help us tweak the plans & flows as needed.

Project 'Lite': I did a mockup in Balsamiq (free demo version!) of our 'Project Lite' setup and gave it to our SN admin as her first   SN 'assignment'. It's primarily removing a lot of fields from the default header (I like the header to be small since I like to create tabs for projects in SN, and don't want all the page's real estate to be on the header, similar to websites — and we don't want to overwhelm our PM's thinking they need to start filling out all this information right away), adding a few fields like 'business area', and creating a 'cost' tab with just a few fields to start out with. I'm hoping to keep one step ahead of requests from the department or leadership for documenting projects all in one place.

Other Updates:

One of our Agile leads did SN's SDLC exercise that I pulled from Knowledge14. She really enjoyed it and asked for the rest of the SDLC exercises. I asked SN but it seems the rest of the SDLC exercises haven't been created yet.

Our directors are sharing information about SN & the SN implementation project with their teams in their team meetings. The first director to plan it created a good outline of discussion points, which we shared with others to make sure everyone is getting the same message. Some are jumping into our instance & clicking around to give a quick demo to their teams.

There is definitely a lot of buzz going on in our department about our future SN tool. Every day my ear catches the word 'ServiceNow' mentioned by the server team or help desk team sitting around the corner from my cubicle. And the tone seems positive — we just need to keep the positive buzz going!