Kelly's SN implementation Blog Post #9

[kellykaufmann]

PPM:

Now that we have the requested projects in the Demand Management module & in-flight projects in Project, we now need to make sure everyone knows how to keep that info updated in ServiceNow. I created a 'how-to' on entering Demands and updating content in Demand & Project, and at the end of the week gave a demo.  

The CIO let me know that leadership didn't do Demand prioritizations/rankings in their meeting. Good. This leaves us time to work on refining the criteria captured & plotted. I set up some meetings for next week to dig into this, including the overall process for reviewing & approving demands. I'm really, really excited to continue to refine this process! I'm thinking we'll continue to refine the project request/review/ranking process this month, and then next month we'll dig into discussions on the process for managing projects at our company.

In the   meantime, I'm sending some minor changes to the Demand & Project screens to our internal SN Admin. We now have a Charter tab in for Project, and I'll start pasting in the Charters for my projects. There's a set of more complex changes that I threw over the wall for our SN Admin + our AOS consultants to set up that will help with our ranking, which should take them a few weeks:

• Create task board for all Demands (we have task boards by business division, still need the one for all Demands)
• In Demand, add field 'Overall rank' and 'Business division rank' which pulls from the task board created above of all demands, and the existing task board of demands by business division. Only the CIO & I should be able to edit the rank fields.
• For the cards in the task board, only plot demands in the 'Qualified' state.
• For the content that appears on each of the task board cards, remove 'state' and 'Updated by'. Add 'ROI %' and 'Priority'. See if there's a way to list which project drivers are checked for that project.
• For the task board, have the red label be a priority of 5, and get rid of the rest of the labels.
• In the Demand Backlog, change the 'key' colors to be based on % confidence.
• In the IT Roadmap, add the portfolio area of 'IT Project Type'.
• And get our good 'ole Project GANTT chart created for each I.T. Project Type and each Business Division

We're over our hours for consultant services for PPM setup for Phase 1….so I'm trying to get our SN Admin to do as much as possible and am treading lightly on the requests that go to our consultants. At the same time, I'm trying to anticipate our needs for our to-be-defined processes and leadership's needs for ranking these Demands so we're not doing a fire drill at an inopportune time.

UAT:

We did a brief Round 2 of UAT for Incident & Problem & Knowledge. When I kicked off round 2, this time my kickoff email included some education on what is UAT, what is a defect, and how Knowledge works. We still got plenty of 'defects' logged that aren't defects — they are requests for changes to menu items, questions on timeout, etc.

We're planning on kicking off Service Catalogue testing mid next week, to last about 3 weeks. We'll stagger the testing — opening a few testing items every couple of days. I got a list of who will test which of the 20+ Service Catalogue items, sent out a detailed email to these UAT testers introducing them to Service Catalogue & UAT, and this time also scheduled a 30-minute UAT kickoff session, at which I will drill into the team what UAT is, what a defect is, etc. We had to make a decision on our UAT approach considering there are several roles for Service Catalogue items — the requestor, the approver(s), and the fulfiller(s). Would we have certain people take on certain roles, or would we have each person take on all 3 roles in UAT? We decided on the latter.

Other:

We internally couldn't log into ServiceNow on Monday, and this was our first time testing our server team on fixing items related to ServiceNow. Ends up there was an issue that required SQL to run which impacted logging into SN via single sign-on. Or something like that. I'm sure I'm describing it wrong. But they now know that doing that will impact our ability to use single sign-on to get into ServiceNow, and that we will have to educate our users on using the side-door login for when single sign-on is being impacted.

We discussed what functionality each team will start using when we go live with Phase 1, but before our centralized service desk is stood up. We decided the 3 groups that will start using SN will not use Service Catalogue items that require approval workflow, since we're not rolling this out to the organization at large (which includes approvers outside of IT) until the new centralized service desk is stood up. We also obviously decided to not turn on email notifications yet.

Phase 2:

We are planning out our requirements discussions for our Phase 2 modules (Asset Mgmt &   Software Asset Mgmt, CMDB, and the many many hours of discussions needed to form a process for Change mgmt). I scheduled a 2 hour session for next week to kick off Change Management, and a 2.5 hour session to discuss AM, SAM, and CMDB. In the meeting invitations, I added links with some basic information about Change Mgmt, AM, SAM, and CMDB. Some of our team members do better when able to gain an understanding of the products ahead of time.

I'm not as concerned about getting requirements for AM/SAM/CMDB, but I am concerned about all the discussions needed to define our Change process.