Author: Malwina

Workspace Agent Chat

Posted on by Malwina

ServiceNow chat features for agents

Within the ServiceNow Platform ITSM, there are 2 real-time chat capabilities for agents, each with distinct functions:

  • Connect Support: for IT support agents, built on Connect Messaging Platform,
  • Workspace Agent Chat: for agents who use Agent Workspace, powered by Advanced Work Assignment.

Connect Support

Connect Support is built on the ServiceNow Connect Platform and is a real-time messaging tool. It provides assistance to end users as well as enables support agents to track their cases, find solutions and resolve problems through support tab of the Connect sidebar or in new tab in full-screen. In Paris release and beyond, Connect Support will not receive enhancements nor non-priority bug fixes, though you can continue to use it, but the recommendation is to migrate it to Agent Chat.

Workspace Agent Chat

Introduced in the ServiceNow Madrid release, Workspace Agent is an easy-to-navigate user interface that enables to open multiple issues and tools at the same time, in a tabbed format, without going to a different screen. It includes all tools that agent needs to:

  • Find and respond to all task types,
  • Communicate in real time with customers by chat or phone,
  • View the full context of an issue,
  • Get recommendations that help to resolve issues,
  • Solve issues and communicate resolution to the requester.

Workspace Agent improves your agent experience and is tailored to the kind of issue that the agents work on. Integrated with chat on the same page, helps easily communicate with end users from the same interface while finding, researching and resolving issues.

Through Agent Chat in Workspace Agent Chat, agents communicate with customers, create incident or case records, or transfer chats to another agent or queue. In turn end users use Live Agent widget on any portal page for chat conversations.

Migration from Connect Support to Workspace Agent Chat

The list of key migration steps in implementing Workspace Agent Chat includes:

  1. Set up and configure Agent Workspace (the Agent Workspace plugin is active),
  2. Review the existing Connect Support configuration and determine whether the new setup should be similar,
  3. Set up Agent Chat and install the Agent Chat plugins,
  4. Set up Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) and install AWA plugin.

Workspace Agent Chat setup

There are couple of things to consider while setting up Workspace Agent Chat:

  • Change the platform chat support interface from Connect Support to Agent Workspace, so all incoming chat messages will rout to Agent Workspace (Chat Setup for Fulfiller),
  • Set or change the system messages that are displayed when the live agent transfer occurs,
  • Assign awa_agent and workspace_agent roles to your agents,
  • Enable the chat client on your end user Service Portal page (it does not require Virtual Agent).

There are couple of things to consider while setting up Workspace Agent Chat:

Change the platform chat support interface from Connect Support to Agent Workspace, so all incoming chat messages will rout to Agent Workspace (Chat Setup for Fulfiller). Set or change the system messages that are displayed when the live agent transfer occurs. Assign awa_agent and workspace_agent roles to your agents. Enable the chat client on your end user Service Portal page (it does not require Virtual Agent).

Advanced Work Assignment

Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) introduces a smart and automatic way of assigning work items to agents, based on their availability, capacity and skills (if defined). Agent Workspace can’t use Connect Support, therefore it’s necessary to configure new AWA queues.

The basic configuration of AWA determines:

What to route

Different service channels can be defined to request different services (chat, cases, incidents etc) and each can individually define agent capacity and utilization conditions.

Where to route

A work item is a single piece of work (task or interaction) routed and assigned to an agent. Defining separate work item queues using own criteria (such as product or customer attributes), allows AWA to automatically route work items to queues based on those routing conditions. Each queue should have defined assignment groups that handle incoming work items. Additionally each queue can have separate settings:

  • Own schedule that defines when queue is available,
  • A time limit within which an agent should accept a work item,
  • Eligibility time constraints to determine when the next pool of agents is eligible for an assignment,
  • An agent assignment rule that determines how to assign work items.

How to assign work items

After work items are routed to correct queue and corresponding agent group, AWA assigns items to most qualified agent based on one of work assignment rules:

  • Last assigned – to push a work item to the agent who has gone longest without a work assignment,
  • Most capacity – to push a work item to the agent who has the most availability for work.

What the agent sees

Agents see their assignments and availability in their Agent Workspace Inbox. Additionally they can reject work items or set up a timer in which agent can reject or accept a particular work item. For control of the agent experience in Workspace Agent Chat, it allows to define agent presence states as well as rejection controls. AWA allows also to consider agent skills in assignment as well – this requires the installation of Skills Management plugin.

The agent can also transfer the chat work item to another agent or queue if needed. There are also response templates available for the agent to enable the sendout of reusable, quick and consistent messages to users.

Agent Chat Capabilities in Orlando

The Orlando release of ServiceNow introduced 2 interesting features to Workspace Agent Chat: Agent Affinity and Idle live chats.

Agent Affinity

Agent Affinity feature allows to create additional rules for AWA queues in order to customize AWA assignment process and identify the agent best suited for a work item instead of orienting a new agent every time. Affinity rule types:

  • Related task – Agent Affinity identifies an agent who has fulfilled past assignments for a related tasks,
  • Account team – AWA looks for agent based on the agent’s responsibility or role in the account team (only for CSM),
  • Historical – identifies an agent based on the agent’s history of interacting with the same customer.

Idle live chats

Idle live chats deliver active live chat sessions which are automatically checked every 2 minutes if a requester responded within last 3 minutes. If not, the session becomes idle and the requester gets a reminder message, asking if they are still there. If there is no response within next 3 minutes, Idle live chat automatically cancels the chat session.

Workspace Agent Chat Experience

The migration to Workspace Agent Chat in Agent Workspace brings an opportunity to give the agents new user experience:

  • All the necessary information about the work item and chat are visible in a single window, without changing the tabs,
  • Work items are always assigned automatically to the best fitting agent based on a number of factors like: their availability, capacity, skills and their historical interaction with customer, past fulfillment of related tasks or their role within the assignment team,
  • The agents are also able to work faster and more efficiently by using response templates. They allow an agent to transfer work to more appropriate queues or agents, manage their inbox status and accept or reject incoming chat.

However, Workspace Agent Chat is a better chat experience not only for agents but also for end users. Now they can receive more individual and dedicated support than before.

Let us know if you have specific needs that either Workspace Agent Chat or the ServiceNow Platform can answer.

Discuss your needs

ServiceNow Safe Workplace

Posted on by Malwina

ServiceNow Safe Workplace is a 4-app suite and dashboard to streamline the process of getting back to your workplace. All designed with your employees’ health and safety in mind, adapted to the post-COVID-19 reality.

Get back to office safe and sound, with ServiceNow aid!

Coordinate your employees’ return, making sure they’re back to the workplace healthy and safe. You can achieve these using 4 apps from ServiceNow:

Employee Readiness Surveys

An app for checking your employees readiness to get to the office, and ensuring they feel secure there. Check the demo below:

Employee Health Screening

An app for meeting all the health and security requirements before an employee enters the workplace. Check the demo below:

Workplace PPE Inventory Management

An app for management of personal protective equipment stock in all your facilities. Check the demo below:

Workplace Safety Management

An app for coordinating your return process, assigning shifts, and planning sanitation. Check the demo below:

All 4 available for your download on the ServiceNow Store, along with our PDF Generator app to aid your document workflows and processes.

Let us help you implement these, we’re here for your organization!

Contact us!

Instance Localization in ServiceNow

Posted on by Malwina

What is Instance Localization

Borders and geographical locations do not restrict modern businesses. With ServiceNow, language is not a limiting factor either. Using the Localization plugin, you can open your services up to users from around the globe.

Often referred to as ‘Internationalization’ and ‘Translation’, the Localization feature is a powerful tool for and within ServiceNow Platform. It enables users to access services, catalogs and knowledge articles in their own language.

The reason it is termed ‘localization’ is that you are not simply providing a direct translation from one language to another. The feature makes your ServiceNow Portal much more user-friendly, allowing you to suit specific local needs.

By using the ServiceNow Platform in this way, you accommodate users from a variety of different countries, using different languages and even currencies, all within the same instance!

This tailored approach increases the chances of driving ‘self-service’ which benefits you and your users – as we explored in a previous blog post Deliver Exceptional Customer Service.

How does Instance Localization work?

The default language supported by ServiceNow is American English, but standard content can be easily translated with the use of the ServiceNow translation plugin. However, if additional or custom translations are required (i.e. service catalog forms, notifications, custom fields, etc.), then additional translations to the target language are required.

You configure the default instance language via the System Properties section and System Localization. Translation information is stored in a few tables: Languages, Translated Name/Field, Message, Field label, Choice, Translated Text. This video from the ServiceNow superstar – Chuck Tomasi provides a nice short example.

Depending on the number of custom fields and unique translations you need, you should review your strategy and approach to the topic carefully, as there are several options available to you. SPOC has supported many customers with these challenges, like Exide Technologies.

Why localization matters?

The research shows that we prefer to communicate in our native language:

  • 72% consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their language.
  • 72% consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product when information is in their language.
  • 56% consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their own language is even more important than price!

Though the foundations of excellent customer service do not change, the technology-driven possibilities are changing every year! Communication with customers should be clear, comfortable and as easy as is it can be! Moreover, business messages should be aimed at the local person and must not be misleading.

Other benefits of localization

If your organisation has a product or service to sell, there are many ways localization can help. Here are just a few:

  • Boost – increase product share by targeting a new market. Simply translate product information to be suitable for the target market,
  • Profits – adapt product and service descriptions to the target customers preferences, making them more confident in what you are offering.
  • Prevent cultural confusion – translate products and services to avoid cultural barriers,
  • Safeguard legal aspects – keep the organization safe by translating legal agreements,
  • Relations with customers and business partners – communicate with them in their native language to effectively build long-term relationships.

How to keep translations correct and consistent?

Dealing with language and custom fields can be challenging, and you need to be precise. If there are differences in the translation of new items in the system, i.e. field name, notification content, etc., you must review new and existing records to ensure accuracy.

The frequency of performing record reviews depends on data retention in the instance, changes introduced and other factors resulting from the specifics of the organization’s work.

If you are unsure about making these changes, we’re here to help.

Reach out for localization assistance

Release Management in ServiceNow

Posted on by Malwina

Release Management in ServiceNow (and other cloud systems) is the key to success in implementing changes. It supports Change Management and organizes the process of uploading any modifications to the production environment.

Release Management – introduction

Release Management first requires a remote session with the customer to identify customer’s needs and expectations. Based on these, we make the following decisions:

  1. How often should the upload take place?
    Frequency can depend on change queue volume. We recommend a weekly basis to keep implementation continuity. However, if the customer wants to upload changes with a different frequency, we can adjust the plan.
  2. What is the best day of the week and time to upload the changes?
    To reduce the impact on the instance users, while choosing the best date and time, we consider different time zones and customer’s availability.
  3. How much time before release the customer should confirm upload of the change to the production instance?
    We highly encourage customers to test every change in the UAT state and confirm if it works properly or not. Moreover, we recommend to determine the final release scope 1 business day before the release date.
  4. What are the other expectations related to the process?
    We need to know what are the other suggestions and how we can include them in the process.

After the session with the customer and discussing all details, we can prepare a draft proposal of a process version. The customer reviews it, and either proposes own corrections or accepts the prepared plan.

Change Management

We group normal changes in releases. Incident resolution and urgent changes are uploaded to production as soon as possible to fix the system failure or implement a business-relevant modification. We use our version of Release Management in ServiceNow instance which is a very convenient tool to take control over the changes and keep the customer informed.

Releases should have a consistent naming convention. Every release should have a unique name, assigned person responsible for managing it on the SPOC side and set date. Every change request record has the “Release” field on the form to provide the proper release number. All changes within a release, can be checked in the release record from Related List.

Release & change planning

On our side, we can see release size based on changes estimates and developers involved in changes implementation. It’s good to plan releases at the beginning of the month, and organize them in the system to observe the delays that may affect the original plan.

The customer should early confirm all changes  in the UAT state, to make us able to upload it properly to the production instance. In case of confirmation delay, we recommend its upload in the next planned release.

If the customer finds any bug, our Maintenance & Development Team implements fixes as soon as possible, implementing the change in the next release. The fixes application time depends on issues complexity.

Release & change implementation

We upload all the changes in maintenance windows first agreed with the customer. Thus the instance users know when they can expect system modifications. If any changes in the release are not uploaded to the production instance, we move them to another release record.

Release reporting

The release manager on the SPOC side provides Release Notes to the customer. The notes contain information about the implemented changes, possible conflicts or issues, and the list of unimplemented changes with the reasons.

All information is visible on the ServiceNow instance – releases have states and fields providing customer with relevant information.

Benefits of Release Management

Release Management brings a number of benefits to each organization:

  1. We take control over changes uploaded to production instance what reduces the risk of unexpected incidents.
  2. We keep the customer informed. It generates the satisfaction – the customer knows which changes were implemented and which were not, knowing the reasons why that happened.
  3. Instance users know when they can expect changes in the system.
  4. If something happens, we can identify faster which change solution was the exact source of the issue.
  5. We can track which changes got stuck in states, e.g. UAT for a long time and speed up the customer’s actions.

Discuss your release management case

Remote work & agile projects continuity

Posted on by Malwina

Remote work is the new reality for businesses now, no matter you are a customer or a supplier, it affects us all. Our project teams have cooperated with customers remotely since the very foundation of SPOC, yet never at such a scale. Let us share how we faced the challenge posed by COVID-19 outbreak and our lessons learned, and find out how to go remote smoothly and quickly.

Preparation for remote work

To be prepared is not only having a plan, but also walking through it in reality. While still working at the SPOC offices, we successfully conducted a full stress test for our IT infrastructure. We asked our employees to report any issues they find. The current SPOC’s IT backbone system has proved its quality, as it was already a part of our day to day activities.

Day 1: Switch to remote work

To minimize probability of the support or project work interruption, everyone transferred their daily duties to home office.

We work mostly with the use of laptops and hardware that allows transportation, so it facilitated organization of a workplace at home. We increased data transfer packages for mobile phones where required, and allowed our employees to use company wide screen displays, laptop stands, as well as prosaic but useful keyboards, mice and headsets.

All teams established communication channels to keep people connected and stay informed. Thus our entire company smoothly moved to the fully dispersed workspace. Next days most of the customers, either already worked remotely or decided to switch to a remote mode as well.

Day 2: Continuous Improvement

To learn fast and adapt to the new ways of working, we launched Remote Work Findings Log. Thus we gather observations covering: local ISP reliance, performance of tools under heavy load, recommendations for the backup solutions etc. It also collates all findings re virtual teams and communication aspects.

Although remote work was always a part of SPOC agile approach, it was never actually tested to that scale before. Our findings are that it quickly became clear that use of cameras provides a human touch to the meetings, a simple routine of quick “hello”, as the first thing in the morning, supports keeping people as a team. Usual jokes, memes and sense of humor went along.

Day 3: Uninterrupted operational continuity

The results have been astonishing so far! Our daily schedule stayed uninterrupted.

When the virus stroke, company was right in the middle of the SPOC Academy (a month training for our new joiners). Our instructor led experience was originally planned to be onsite, but only started onsite, to seamlessly go virtual in the middle of the course. Now we are teaching our new joiners with the use of electronic means, and that’s the only change.

Almost as nothing has ever happened. All the trainings planned, where possible are run in the form of webinars or virtual classes, without any delays. The Internet based steaming is also useful for company update events. It’s an essential part of spreading the word and keeping teams in sync with action plans for now and the next weeks and months.

Remote Sprint Retro

It’s been 2 weeks now, since we switched to remote work – a typical length of a sprint. Most of the customers did not notice any difference, and they really appreciate coping well with the new work arrangements.

We did face some hiccups in the communication, caused mainly by the teleconference system stability, and related to 3rd party providers. Wherever identified, we move over to an alternative tool to remediate the issue. Internally, we have observed that switching from a collocated team to a distributed one, adds some additional load. A quick call might be the fastest way to deal with that.

On the other hand, a natural reduction of communication channels turned out to be beneficial. Of course, when the customer required physical presence, as the one and only acceptable option, it did not work at all in the current situation.

Tools for remote cooperation

The tools we use to organize and facilitate own work, project management as well as cooperation with internal teams and customers include:

Gathering customer feedback

It is crucial to understand whether or not, the new ways of working have affected our customer in any way. And swiftly adjust them where required. This is what our customers say about our cooperation in the current circumstances:

Honestly, from my perspective it was always remote 🙂 So I don’t see any difference.

Smith & Nephew

From my side, I haven’t noticed any difference, to be honest.

Smith & Nephew

I have no problems with how it is working and appreciate that we are able to continue and make good progress despite the situation we have found ourselves in. Please thank your team for their co-operation which continues to be excellent.

Smith & Nephew

The temporary remote work will be a trigger for global changes in our industry, which is already characterized by a high flexibility. By the time the COVID-19 pandemics ends, broadscale remote work will become something usual. Especially in the IT world. Thus it’a good moment for all of us to prove that distance is not an obstacle to provide top quality service. The capable professionals’ efficiency will remain the same or even increase, at the same time skyrocketing their value in the market.

Sergiusz Bojarczyk | Project Manager, ServiceNow SAIF
British Council

These are not only words of appreciation and confirmation of keeping up the progress. They are also valuable inputs for the improvements we can make in the technical and non-technical means of communication, that can be addressed immediately by our teams. We are all taking situation seriously, that’s why we are able to manage it well.

Looking into the future

It’s too bad that we cannot do a typical prank by sending an e-mail to all employees, promising donuts for everyone. A humorous reminder not to leave your computer unblocked. But it will be back, it is just a matter of time. Now is the time to excel in the effective remote work. Whereas the unpredictable challenges we’re facing now, will strengthen us, making us all much wiser and definitely far more antifragile.

All the above findings follow from our experience, where our entire ServiceNow Platform projects delivery takes place remotely, based on agile methodology. And 1 of the most recent examples is the installation and onboarding of the apps developed by ServiceNow to manage safety and operational continuity during COVID-19 pandemic and unexpected work mode changes.

ServiceNow Orlando release overview – mobile app, ITSM, ITBM

Posted on by Malwina

Orlando vs New York release

ServiceNow Orlando release offers the next round of enhancements to:

and the earlier existing features like:

With every release ServiceNow moves toward innovation and better products, with the main focus put on continuous improvement of organizations and value brought to the customers. Since New York, there have been many new features introduced such as mobile app and business-specific apps. Always with user experience at the center of attention.

The features included, like Guided Application Creator or Now Mobile, are very helpful in everyday SDLC, from developers’ perspective. Another nice feature introduced in the New York release was Dynamic Translation. It enables users to integrate with any translation provider (e.g. Google translator), and then dynamically use it to translate texts.

The Orlando release is expected to get a wider access in March. Except enhancements and improvements of the existing features, it introduces a range of new features.

New ITBM features in Orlando release

Agile Development 2.0

Agile development has been enhanced with a Scrum Program. A SCRUM Program is a tool used to plan and track the work of your team, compare workloads, manage dependencies and more. It includes also quick start tests for Agile Development, which are a collection of tests for agile to speed up the process. What’s more, Agile Development 2.0. covers also Performance Analytics content pack.

Application Portfolio Management

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a tool that allows users and organizations to better manage the application inventory, provide business context and determine the business value of each app. The New features added in Orlando:

  • GRC controls in business applications,
  • APM standalone plugin separation,
  • Quick start tests for Application Portfolio Management.

Application Portfolio Management - new features in Now Platform Orlando release

NEW ITSM features in Orlando release

As for ITSM, the need for improvements is higher. The ITSM suite is one of the most commonly used suites in many organizations. Some of the enhancements added in the new release:

Change Management

  • Simplified conflict change management with conflict properties,
  • Use of change approval policies to modify them,
  • Management of change requests with the ITSM Agent Workspace,
  • Delivery of change tasks with ServiceNow Agent mobile app.

Workspace Management

  • Creation of knowledge articles from an incident,
  • Generation of knowledge gap records for a specific issue based on an incident,
  • Creation of a similar incident for a different caller,
  • Addition of new search categories on Incident Agent Assist,
  • Tracking of agents’ interaction times,
  • Monitoring of Continual Improvement Management fixes from a problem record.

Analytics – ServiceNow Orlando release

Natural Language Understanding

ServiceNow offers Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to make the platform understands and answers user’s intent. To increase efficiency in understanding the intent, ServiceNow Orlando brings a number of new features like:

  • Users can make use of existing NLU models, and avoid cloning the NLU model,
  • Instead of using predefined entities users can create a custom-made derived entity based on their needs,
  • Apart from using predefined entities, users can make any entity across all NLU model intents available,
  • The interactive dashboard measures the performance metrics of NLU models.

Predictive Intelligence

Predictive Intelligence (PI):

  • Constantly monitors each resource’s capability as well as compares and creates clusters to foster decision making process. Instead of word embedding-based classification, it creates classification based on Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Moreover, users can define their own custom stop words that enrich predefined system stop words to improve the capability to categorize, compare, and create clusters,
  • Allows to configure target metrics for a trained classification solution and along with DBSCAN also can be configured to improve precision in clustering solutions,
  • Provides an updated API framework that permits users to incorporate machine learning capabilities in workflows.

Analytics in Now Platform Orlando release

Updated ServiceNow mobile app

The ServiceNow Platform mobile app in the Orlando release encourages better mobility of services, while offering intuitive user experience. Now it includes a range of tools to:

  • Ease accessibility – via configuration of an embedded list,
  • Avoid displaying content – admins can hide empty fields,
  • Create an applet launcher – to serve as a landing page for your users,
  • Manage mobile application integrations securely – with Microsoft Intune or Blackberry Dynamics,
  • Ensure tracking – the mobile dashboard comes with Performance Analytics widget,
  • Track which browsers users use,
  • Allow image-based search – with the use of objects,
  • Measure KPIs – via mobile analytics dashboards for admins.

Discuss your instance upgrade

Three ServiceNow apps to manage COVID-19 pandemic

Posted on by Malwina

Customer care plan

ServiceNow prepared a customer care plan and three apps to help organizations ensure operations continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Find the details below.

The customer care plan by ServiceNow covers:

  • Maintenance of virtually 100% uptime for ServiceNow instances,
  • Now Community forum for customers and partners to interact and share best practices,
  • Dedicated portal for customers and partners to provide ideas for COVID-19 related apps or features.

3 ServiceNow apps to manage COVID-19 pandemic

Developed in partnership with the ServiceNow’s customer, Washington State’s Department of Health, the applications* are aimed at emergency management in terms of:

  • Outreach,
  • Self-reporting,
  • Exposure monitoring and reaction.

Below you can identify the areas where they can be used, perhaps in your organization?

Emergency Self-Report app

The Emergency Self-Report app for your employees to:

  • Report their self-quarantine,
  • Inform about the projected return to work time.

And for employer:

  • Workflow support.

Emergency Exposure Management app

In case of diagnosis with COVID-19 of your employee, the Emergency Exposure Management app analyzes the employee’s meeting agenda and locations, identifying people who also might have been exposed to the pandemic risk.

Emergency Outreach app

The Emergency Outreach app allows you to assess what impact the pandemic has had for your employees. You can get in touch with your employees:

  • Via email – sharing information, safety measures and ask them to confirm if they’re safe and what’s their location,
  • Via the ServiceNow® Now Mobile App – sending push notifications asking for confirmation of safety and location.

Implement the apps & get support

All remote access happens using secure connections and multifactor authentication. All the apps are available free of charge at servicenow.com/crisisresponse for all ServiceNow customers by September 30, 2020.

We’ve already implemented the apps for our own safety and operational continuity purposes. SPOC team is prepared and 100% ready to support you in the installation and onboarding of the apps in your organization.

Contact us for support

* The apps are designed for immediate use at no charge for existing customers. Others can use these apps through September 30, 2020. After September 30, if you are receiving value and would like to continue use of these apps, ServiceNow will work with you to move to the standard ServiceNow Platform App Engine pricing.

Go-Live at British Council

Posted on by Malwina

Last week out team went to Warsaw to celebrate ServiceNow go-live with our customer – British Council.

The customer implemented ServiceNow-SCOM integration tool, which was a bullseye when it comes to optimization of the time spent on the technical tickets management and their assignment to a proper team. As a result British Council technical teams get more time to focus on important tasks! Our team also supported the preparation of the internal announcement and presentation of the features available.

Thank you SPOC team for a fine delivery. We wish all the new users the best user experience possible and we’re looking forward to further developments in the future!

ServiceNow upgrade & best practices

Posted on by Malwina

Upgrade challenges

ServiceNow upgrade is a standard operation, being a part of instance maintenance. The upgrade time depends on the complexity of an instance and features in a new version.

To minimize the risk and reduce the impact on the instance operation, an upgrade can be defined as a project, because it’s a set of steps and factors to consider. It’s important to be aware of the challenges occurring during the upgrade process.

The challenges faced during an upgrade are:

  • It’s hard to cover all cases within all features in test scenarios,
  • It’s important to control all bugs which are reported as “caused by upgrade” and identify them properly,
  • It’s good to know about all tables which should be excluded from cloning and plugins turned only on development or test environments,
  • It’s necessary to make data backups,
  • It’s important to choose the date and time of an upgrade that is convenient for both sides (customer and vendor) to reduce the risk,
  • It’s good to prepare schedule with time buffers to ensure more time, e.g. to fix unexpected bugs found by testers.

Even if it’s not possible to eliminate all the risks, a standardized approach always helps streamline your upgrade.

Preparation to a ServiceNow upgrade

Every team responsible for the ServiceNow Platform upgrade should review the new version’s release notes on the ServiceNow’s website. Release notes contain information about the added and enriched features by ServiceNow, and allow you to familiarize with the ServiceNow elements affected by the upgrade most.

After the analysis, it’s worth to think about:

  1. How many resources are available?
  2. How many instances should be upgraded?
  3. What is the complexity of the instance to upgrade (e.g. number of roles, scripts, integrations)?

Based on the answers, we are able to prepare a detailed schedule of an upgrade.

Production instance upgrade

The production instance upgrade should be planned after business hours. It allows to reduce the impact on the key instance features and to check if they work properly, if any inconsistencies won’t generate critical or high priority incidents in the nearest future.

The upgrade project should start with the clones. The cloning should be done from production instance to development and test instances. The alignment of environments allows more accurate checking what can happen after the production instance is upgraded thanks to the exact copy of production instance.

Before preparing clones, it’s recommended to verify which plugins are turned on the development and test instances, and what data should be excluded. At the same time it’s important to save all crucial copies. We should remember about verification of how clones were executed and if all works as expected.

After making clones, testers are able to prepare test scenarios or rebuild existing ones if necessary. The test scenarios can be used in the future, for the next ServiceNow upgrade(s) and regression test(s). Instead of manual test scenarios, a good approach is to use ATF (Automated Test Framework) by ServiceNow. It is a paid plugin offering a number of capabilities to automate tests on the instance.

Development vs. test instance upgrade

After the preparation of manual or automated test scenarios, the development instance can be upgraded to a chosen ServiceNow version. After verifying which records were skipped and analyzing the content of these records after the upgrade, we can decide what’s the next step.

There are 2 ways to choose from:

  1. Upgrade of the test instance, followed by the upload of all iterations of implemented fixes. All tests should be done on the test instance then.
  2. Execution on the development instance and waiting with test instance upgrade till the end of the project. Where all tests are done on the development instance and test instance is the environment to compare existing features before and after upgrade.

The first option is a common one. The second one may seem controversial, but provides a clean environment (the test instance) to compare if bugs reported by testers or customers are caused by the upgrade.

Testers can check the instance according to the test scenarios prepared, and report bugs to the upgrade team. Simultaneously, customer’s team also can test the entire instance to find any inconsistencies. After the tests, developers are ready to analyze all bugs, identify their cause (upgrade or not) and prepare proper fixes. Their inclusion in a single Update Set allows us to easily transfer them between environments, without conflicts.

The fixes prepared by developers should be checked on the development or test instance (following the chosen approach) by the testers again. Any additional fixes should be prepared within proper Update Set and marked with a version number. The preparation of fixes and testing them requires repeating until the last bug in the upgraded instance is fixed.

Upgrade chronology

A team or person responsible for the upgrade should track upgrade status in Upgrade Monitor. Once the upgrade process is finished, logs and skipped records should be verified and only then Update Sets with fixes should be uploaded. The key instance features (e.g. incident form, roles and users, request form) should be reviewed to make sure that everything works properly and won’t generate serious issues.

Final step in upgrade process

Following the approach chosen, after achieving the instance stabilization, we can either close the project or upgrade the test instance and upload all fixes. It’s recommended to make clones after the successful implementation of all upgrade steps, and once again align all the environments.

Our Maintenance & Development team will be more than happy to support you in your upgrade endeavors.

Discuss your ServiceNow upgrade

TensorFlow – Your Solution for Story Estimation in ServiceNow

Posted on by Malwina

TensorFlow is the basic architecture used by SPOC dev team to develop a tool for the story estimation in the ServiceNow Platform. It’s an example of supervised machine learning, where the model is trained from the examples that contain labels. Before we walk through all tasks to solve this specific problem, let’s dive into the very algorithm and overall approach.

Neural Network algorithm (NN)

Neural Network algorithm (NN) is an abstract structure that tries to mimic behavior of elemental brain components – neurons. In general, each network is made up of many units that are able to communicate with neurons from the adjacent layers. The most basic type of NN is built with only 2 layers of neurons called “Input” and “Output”.

In our case, we also used 2 hidden layers that are located between “In” and “Out”. In some sense, the hidden layers are places where NN can store information about how important for a specific “out“ neuron is each previous neuron that was activated based on “In” signal. This knowledge is expressed via special values called “weights”.

Neural Network weights

Each neuron has as many different weights, as the number of neurons that may propagate signal to it. During the training process, NN tries to adjust how important for an end accuracy each weight is in context of a different combination of “In” signals and correlated with them “Out” values. This learning step is called back propagation.

Analyzing this structure in the context of our task, the number of neurons on “In” layer is equal to the number of defined words in the Dictionary set. The last “out” layer has only 8 elements that correspond with 8 different, possible answers interpreted as estimation value.

The NN that is the result of this step that has:

  • defined size of “In” and “Out” for each hidden layer,
  • selected proper activation functions (not discussed here to keep this article as simple as possible),
  • adjusted weights (trained weights),

and it’s called a model.

From a mathematical perspective, the model is more or less just an ordered set of matrices that can be written as:

tensorflow ServiceNow neural network algorithm matrix

Where:

  • x is a input vector,
  • f-s are different activation functions,
  • A-s are matrices where weights are stored,
  • B-s are vectors where biases are stored.

7-step story estimation with TensorFlow

The solution our dev team built using the above mentioned algorithm is called TensorFlow. It can be applied for estimating ServiceNow stories in terms of time and resources. Its architecture consists of the following steps.

STEP 1: Data preparation and preprocessing

Data prepared and preprocessed in our case are acceptance criteria and description from every story. We removed here the stories written in a language different than English, and also filtered out stories with estimate (which is our label) higher than 8 hours, to get proper training data set.

STEP 2: Dictionary development

Dictionary is built with the use of Natural Language Processing methods, and is meant to establish the occurrence of a certain word in the acceptance criteria and description of a story. The words are filtered based on the length (longer than 3) and a part of speech (nouns, verbs). The following NLP methods are used:

  • normalization,
  • tokenization,
  • lemmatization.

The output:

ServiceNow stories - Tensorflow dictionary keywords

STEP 3: Model development

The model is developed with the use of machine learning. In this step, it learns the structure of the training data set to make predictions about unseen data. This in turn requires the decision upon:

  • number of neural network layers,
  • number of epochs,
  • loss and gradient function,
  • selection of optimization algorithm.

STEP 4: Training loop

The training loop starts with each description and acceptance criteria being translated separately into binary vectors. The binary vectors represent a number of occurrences in the dictionary (see the picture below). They are processed by neural network together with labels (estimate value), and once the model is trained and “proven”, it’s ready to make predictions of unknown data.

ServiceNow stories - word weights probability Tensorflow

STEP 5: Value prediction

To start predicting values, again description and acceptance criteria are translated separately into binary vectors. Then the vector is processed by the neural network, and the vector of probabilities (numbers representing hours from 1 to 8) is provided.

STEP 6: Estimation

Then the final values (number of hours estimated by the TensorFlow) for acceptance criteria and description was chosen using mathematical approximation based on the neighboring values of elements with the highest probability. In order to calculate it the following formula was given:

ServiceNow - n-th element approximation Tensorflow

Where:

  • Pn represents the probability of the n-th element (1<=n<=8),
  • i is the position of the element with the highest probability.

STEP 7: Final value

The final value is obtained with the combination of both the values from acceptance criteria and description. It’s delivered with the formula below:

ServiceNow story final value - Tensorflow

The multipliers (0.6 and 0.4) are determined as a result of stories preprocessing.

Story estimation for your organization

If you face any challenges related to project estimation or incidents management, consider AI and our ServiceNow solution to:

  • estimate delivery time of your projects, epics and stories, from the onset to the final outcome,
  • automate incidents with classification, reporting and management tools and automatically assign them to a category, group, or a person responsible.

Our team is at your disposal.

SPOC S.A.
ul. Szyperska 14
61-754 Poznań, Poland
ul. Grzybowska 43
00-855 Warszawa, Poland
sales@spoc.eu +48 614 152 903

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