My ServiceNow Journey: From rookie developer to Master Architect

It was December 2015 when I first entered Deloitte office as a new employee. Half of the open space was empty as people were already busy with their Christmas shopping. I, on the other hand, was a man with a mission! I had been hired as the first technical person to help Deloitte Portugal build their ServiceNow Practice. At this point I didn't even know what ServiceNow was and on my desk there was a small post-it that read something like this:

So that's what I did, off to ServiceNow wiki, that old, reliable source of information that I so often miss these days. The months after were all about studying during the evenings and practising on my personal environment during the day. I figured that if we were to build a ServiceNow practice I might as well set an example and get decent at it, otherwise no what developer in is right mind would want to join our team?

Once my mind was set that I would become a reference in ServiceNow it didn't take me long to take all available ServiceNow certifications (there were three at the time - Sys Admin, IT Service Management and Application Developer) and without an actual engagement to give me a taste of the real world I would spend hours on the ServiceNow Community answering questions and absorbing knowledge from other people's replies.

And then finally I got to be part of my first ServiceNow implementation: a digital transformation programme for a medium-size insurance company. Perfect!

As with any developer keen to getting my hands dirty I did what everyone else seemed to be doing at the time - over-customising!

Client: Can we have different flow formatters for the same table?

Sure!

Client: Can I click on a previous state of the workflow and go back to that state?

Why not?

Client: Can I create my own interceptors instead of using the OOB ones?

Absolutely.

And so on...

Needless to say that whilst exciting that got me and my (very junior) team in great trouble. Night after night we would be reading blogs - servicenow elite, sn-protips, snc-blog, amongst others - to try and understand how the hell could we manipulate the UI, at times querying the database directly (you could at the time) and even adding Java snippets when Glide wasn't enough.

If there was a ServiceNow resource out there at the time we've definitely checked it at some point!

After 8 months we finally did it - my first ever ServiceNow go-live and, of course, cake!

Being a ServiceNow developer and, later, an Architect allowed me to travel around which was both a blessing and a curse as I sacrificed time with friends and family to focus on my career. Didn't matter if Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway, UK, where there was a client in need of a trustworthy and committed SNow team, we would be there.

From that moment onward it was time to mature. I was getting confident on my technical skills but I had a lot to learn about handling client requirements, managing scope creep, staying aligned with product roadmap in order to avoid wasted implementation effort, in short, it was no longer about the tool - it was about managing a ServiceNow project!

During those years I learned a lot about Design Thinking, Governance, leading workshops, highlighting business outcomes rather than product features but also got better at emotional intelligence, stakeholder analysis, customers' natural resistance to change and how fundamental it is to incorporate an Organisational Change Management workstream from day 1 otherwise regardless of how great the product is, if no one uses it, it's a failure.

My skillset around ServiceNow was slowly but steadily growing broader and deeper and engagements got increasingly hard as well. Typical ITSM engagements stopped being the norm and I found myself delivering multi-geography hundred of thousand euros engagements covering more than one product and addressing complex challenges not just functionally, e.g. how to standardise the Change and Release processes of a federated organisation, but also technical - how to bring millions of records per hour into ServiceNow using an Enterprise Service Bus, transform map chains and concurrent processes for updating the database to prevent a performance meltdown.

In parallel I was actively helping the team grow by delivering training, first to classes with just a handful of students, then slightly larger and finally full rooms with more than 25 participants.

During the last 4 years I have trained over 100 people on SNow and been a mentor to some who have now reached the Master Architect credential themselves.

And by August 2019, it finally happened. Sponsored and encouraged by KPMG I got the chance to apply for the highest cred of them all and have my opportunity to prove all that I had learned until then. Spent a couple nights filling out why I should be considered for ServiceNow's CMA course and man was I glad a couple of weeks after to find out that I had been chosen for their 6-month intense ServiceNow course throughout which I would be able to meet some of the best architects in the World and those most influential at ServiceNow.

I won't lie. It wasn't easy. It involved a lot of multi-tasking conciliating three 2-hour sessions every week with my day job, travelling to the other side of the World to meet ServiceNow's decision makers. Overwhelming, exhilarating, tiring but, most of all, incredibly rewarding!

Thursday, 16th January 2020 was the day everything came together. I had exactly 1 hour to show evidence that I deserved to receive the ultimate ServiceNow badge. The panellists were expecting nothing short of a wide range of knowledge from (quite) technical questions, through how to deliver a successful ServiceNow engagement all the way to the top discussing how the product can meet the CIO's vision and strategic goals.

The outcome can be found on this article's cover.

I would like to thank my cohort for all their support and friendship throughout the course and state how deeply thankful I am to Dale Brown and Julian Mills who not only gave me the opportunity in the first place but were also restless when it came to giving us, participants, the best possible experience and making sure we took the most out of it!