Growing up, my mom made us all watch the Wizard of Oz. My favorite part was when Dorothy meets the Wizard. Second favorite part? When he is revealed to be just a regular person with some really cool technology ;)
This concept resonates with me when I work with customers who are in a partnership with a System Implementer to build their ServiceNow solutions. Those solutions are usually built behind a closed curtain and the capability is usually revealed during Sprint Demos or during User Acceptance Testing. Unfortunately, this is only the experience portion of the capability without any real notion of how it was constructed. And most customers really only care about the capability and the experience part anyway.
I have worked with many customers during my 15+ year ServiceNow journey. There have been a handful of customers along the way that had very inquisitive stakeholders that wanted to know what was behind that curtain. And all they had to do was ask and I was willing and able to show them. In fact, an even smaller number of customers asked me to train them how to build these capabilities themselves. Brilliant! It wasn't baked into the SOW, but it didn't cost me much more than a few 30-minute sessions to show them where to get educated and how to build some core features which would create a foundation of knowledge to begin their own ServiceNow journey.
Customers should insist that their System Implementers educate them on the capabilities they are building. At the very least, insist that knowledge transfer (KT) happen and knowledge articles or Design Specifications are written and delivered as part of KT.
An even better approach is that customers incentivize their teams to become knowledgeable on the capabilities that are being delivered. ServiceNow offers a ton of FREE resources for anyone to become a ServiceNow Wizard. Granted, it takes time and experience, but that first step toward the 1000 mile journey is the most important one. Of the free resources available, these are what I feel are most important:
ServiceNow Learning Portal - Here you can sign up for certification journeys and take a ton of free courses to learn any capability in ServiceNow. There are many courses that cost money, but many are completely FREE! If you are implementing a new capability (e.g. HRSD or CSM), it is a great idea to have your internal platform support team to take the fundamentals courses.
ServiceNow Developer Portal - This is a great way to get your resources familiar with the platform. After signing up, you can spin up your very own developer instance and install most plugins or capabilities (for FREE!) and begin to "tinker" to your heart's content without messing up your own Path to Production (PtP). It is a great way to learn how capabilities and configurations work without impact to your own PtP.
ServiceNow Documentation - This site provides all the Product Documentation you could ever ask for on any ServiceNow capability. The best part: You can export any of the documentation to PDF. You can export from the top level or from any of the underlying levels (sub-topics). Maybe you need to disseminate the Employee Relations capability without exporting the entire HRSD Product Documentation repository? You can do that!
ServiceNow Community - Rounding out my short list of the best free resources available in ServiceNow is the Community. If you are facing an issue in ServiceNow, it is highly likely someone else has faced the same issue before. It could be performance, defects, something isn't working quite right, or just need some helpful insight into how something should work. The community also has a reward system that provides incentives to be interactive and to ask and answer community questions. I guarantee you that many of your System Implementers are coming to this site to look for the best solutions for implementing a feature.
If you find yourself in a "man behind the curtain" situation and feel like a capability or feature is obfuscated by a curtain, ask to see behind the curtain. Even better, learn as much about those controls as the Wizard knows. Incentivize your teams through rewards, recognitions or promotions so they can take ownership of the success of the platform. And insist that your System Implementers provide documentation and training to your resources. A quick training session will pull that curtain back.
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