ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders

ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders

by Roy Justus, David Zhao
Released December 2022
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781803245294

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Gain insight and strategic advice for driving value in your organization with this practical guide that condenses a decade of ServiceNow wisdom into the must-know essentials for impactful deployments

Key Features

  • Focus on what to do when shaping and leading a ServiceNow journey
  • Explore strategies for making your projects impactful and valuable
  • Guidance for leaders at every level to maximize return on their investments in ServiceNow

Book Description

ServiceNow is the leading enterprise service management platform that enables the effective management of services in a modern enterprise.

In this book, you'll learn how to avoid pitfalls that can challenge value realization, where to focus, how to balance tradeoffs, and how to get buy-in for complex decisions. You'll understand the key drivers of value in ServiceNow implementation and how to structure your program for successful delivery. Moving ahead, you'll get practical guidance on the methods and considerations in securely using ServiceNow. You'll also learn how to set up a multi-instance environment including best practices, patterns and alternatives in the use and maintenance of a multi-instance pipeline. Later chapters cover methods and approaches to design processes that deliver optimal ROI. Further, you'll receive tips for designing technical standards, designing for scale, ensuring maintainability, and building a supportable instance. Finally, you'll focus on the innovative possibilities that can be unlocked in a ServiceNow journey which will help you to manage uncertainty and claim the value of being an early adopter.

By the end of this book, you'll be prepared to lead or support a ServiceNow implementation with confidence that you're bringing not only a solution but also making an impact in your organization.

What you will learn

  • Understand the key drivers of value in ServiceNow implementation
  • Structure your ServiceNow programs for successful delivery
  • Discover methods and tools for securely using ServiceNow
  • Set up a multi-instance environment with best practices and patterns
  • Architect and lead the deployment of AI capabilities in ServiceNow
  • Build innovative experiences using NLU, virtual agents and the Now Experience Framework

Who this book is for

This book is for architects, consultants and project leaders looking to drive value by applying ServiceNow effectively and efficiently. Platform administration or development experience is useful but not necessary to get the most out of this book. However, some familiarity with the modules and features of ServiceNow is expected.

Table of contents

  1. ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders
  2. Contributors
  3. About the authors
  4. About the reviewer
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the color images
    5. Conventions used
    6. Get in touch
    7. Share Your Thoughts
    8. Download a free PDF copy of this book
  6. Part 1 – Pursuit of Value
  7. Chapter 1: Understanding the Value of ServiceNow
    1. Managing for value
      1. What is value?
      2. Why is managing ServiceNow’s value important?
      3. Who is responsible for value?
      4. How do we define value?
      5. Types of value
    2. Service quality
      1. Defining a service scope
      2. Service quality metrics
      3. Planning for service quality
      4. Identifying opportunities in the current state
      5. Aligning the implementation scope with the opportunity
    3. Cost optimization
      1. Process efficiency
      2. Process efficiency metrics
      3. Asset optimization
    4. Customer experience
      1. Tools for customer experience
      2. Scoping customer experience value – portals
      3. Scoping customer experience value – Virtual Agent
      4. Measuring customer experience
    5. Innovation enablement
      1. Ideation
      2. Project management
    6. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: Recognizing and Avoiding Value Traps
    1. Replicating the current state
      1. The tool replacement approach
      2. Arguments in favor of replicating the current state
      3. Issues with replicating the current state
      4. Strategy 1 – Adopting the out-of-the-box process
      5. Strategy 2 – Developing an MVP process
    2. Ignoring the current state
      1. Focusing on the future
      2. Failing to learn from the past
      3. Strategy 1 – Process shadowing
      4. Tips for conducting process shadowing
      5. The time investment of process shadowing
      6. The expected benefits of process shadowing
      7. Strategy 2 – Data analysis
      8. Targeting data analysis
      9. Conducting exploratory analysis
      10. Integrating value and analysis
      11. The importance of intentional time allocation
    3. Chasing the long tail
      1. The appeal of aiming for 100% coverage
      2. The distribution of value
      3. Risks of completeness
      4. Strategy 1 – Top N selection
      5. The recommended approach for ranking
      6. Strategy 2 – Minimal implementation for long-tail items
    4. Not managing change
      1. The first cut – OCM
      2. Risks of reducing the OCM effort
      3. Optimizing value from OCM
      4. Responding to insufficient management of change
      5. Applying high-impact OCM activities
      6. Target state work instructions
      7. Transition support service
    5. The science experiment
      1. Projects extending ServiceNow
      2. Risks of the science experiment
      3. Recognizing a science experiment
      4. Handling a science experiment
    6. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: Capturing Value from your Implementation
    1. Lowering the process cycle time
      1. Causes of long cycle times
      2. Confusion in how and where to engage a process
      3. How to measure process cycle times and see your issues
      4. Delays in response to requests for service
      5. Inability to find the right expertise to fulfil the request
      6. Lost updates and poor transitions between service fulfillment parties
      7. How your ServiceNow transformation can reduce process cycle times
      8. How to prepare for an implementation with a focus on reducing the cycle time
    2. Optimizing asset utilization
      1. Causes of poor asset utilization
      2. How your ServiceNow transformation can improve asset utilization
      3. How to prepare for an implementation with a focus on optimizing asset utilization
    3. Automating toil
      1. Sources of toil
      2. Where ServiceNow can automate toil
      3. How to prepare for an implementation with a focus on automating toil
    4. Improving customer experience
      1. Where customer experience can improve
      2. Where ServiceNow can help improve customer experience
      3. How to prepare for an implementation to improve customer experience
    5. Summary
  10. Chapter 4: Planning an Implementation Program for Success
    1. Defining the scope of the project
      1. Important components of the project scope
      2. Adding details to the scope
    2. Planning the release and release activities
      1. Releasing often (minimizing impacts)
      2. Considering external dependencies
      3. Planning for data migration and validation
      4. Considering testing and training
    3. Structuring the implementation team
      1. Examining major project functions
      2. Examining team leads and their skill sets
      3. Can’t I just hire a consultant for all this?
    4. Governance
      1. Accelerating decision-making with a good governance model
      2. Reducing the overhead of governance
    5. Value management
    6. Summary
  11. Part 2 – The Checklist
  12. Chapter 5: Securing Your ServiceNow Instances
    1. The case for investment in security
      1. What is at risk?
      2. Securing leadership support for security
    2. Planning for instance hardening
      1. Implementation security measures
      2. Planning for secure platform operations
    3. Improving instance security posture
      1. Instance Security Center
    4. Encryption
      1. How to approach encryption
      2. Encryption types
    5. Integration security
      1. Source and target system security
      2. Securing endpoints
      3. Authentication and service accounts in ServiceNow
      4. Role of the ServiceNow MID Server
    6. Summary
  13. Chapter 6: Managing Multiple ServiceNow Instances
    1. What are ServiceNow instances?
    2. Instance administration operations
      1. zBoot – a full reset of your instance
      2. System clone – copying the configuration and data from another instance
    3. Code promotion and data flow
    4. Designing your ServiceNow landscape
    5. Summary
  14. Chapter 7: Designing Effective Processes at Scale
    1. ServiceNow’s process automation capabilities and archetypes
      1. Technical components of the platform that deal with event intake or user input
      2. Technical components of the platform that manage workflows
      3. Technical components of the platform that deal with tasking and the execution of automated actions
      4. Technical components of the platform that deal with shared and foundational data
    2. Designing process automation by utilizing platform building blocks and data
      1. Creating repeatable and reusable patterns to ease implementation complexity
    3. Summary
  15. Chapter 8: Platform Team Processes, Standards, and Techniques
    1. Platform management and technical standards
      1. Setting standards to manage platform maintenance and risk
      2. Standards and tips to manage platform changes
    2. Operational processes and techniques of technical development
      1. Teams should manage the accuracy of their estimations and the consistency of their throughput
      2. Teams should use version control whenever possible and use it as a way of managing code review and quality control processes
    3. Summary
  16. Part 3 – From Success to Innovation
  17. Chapter 9: Effectively Operating ServiceNow
    1. The differences between operations and project work
    2. Establishing a platform strategy
      1. Who will be the platform’s customers?
      2. How will the platform fit within the broader technology landscape?
    3. Establishing a platform operating model
      1. Platform operating model roles
      2. Who will manage the direction of the platform and how?
      3. Who will manage the intake of platform demands and how?
      4. Who will manage how changes are implemented on the platform and how?
      5. Who will manage the funding of changes on the platform and how?
    4. Operating the platform
      1. Executive sponsor and operating committee
      2. Platform owner
      3. Business analyst/product owner
      4. Demand managers
      5. Platform architect
    5. Summary
  18. Chapter 10: Artificial Intelligence in ServiceNow
    1. Understanding AI and ML
      1. What is AI?
    2. The AI/ML capabilities of the ServiceNow platform
      1. Predictive intelligence
      2. Practical example – automating an incident routing rule
    3. Classification framework
      1. Assessing the applicability of the classification framework
      2. Getting started with the classification framework
    4. Regression framework
      1. Metrics for regression
      2. Input data quality
      3. Improving data quality
    5. Similarity framework
      1. Assessing the similarity framework’s performance
    6. Clustering framework
      1. Creating a clustering solution
    7. Summary
  19. Chapter 11: Designing Exceptional Experiences
    1. Types of ServiceNow user interfaces
      1. Jelly
      2. Service Portal
      3. Next Experience
    2. Portals
      1. Types of portals
      2. The journey from department to enterprise portals
      3. Employee Center Pro
      4. Content taxonomy
      5. Custom app portals and portal customizations
      6. Application portals
    3. Workspaces
      1. Determining which workspaces to use
    4. Optimizing experiences with user-facing AI
      1. AI Search
      2. AI Search configurability
    5. Conversational interfaces
      1. Incorporating Virtual Agent into your user experience
      2. Advantages of Virtual Agent as a user interface
      3. Disadvantages of conversational interfaces
      4. Recommendations for Virtual Agent
      5. ServiceNow NLU
    6. Summary
  20. Index
    1. Why subscribe?
  21. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you
    2. Share Your Thoughts
    3. Download a free PDF copy of this book

Product information

  • Title: ServiceNow for Architects and Project Leaders
  • Author(s): Roy Justus, David Zhao
  • Release date: December 2022
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781803245294