Principle 2 - Visibility
Best Practices
Following are the visibility best practices for ServiceNow Platform Engineering. These practices will help you understand the value your ServiceNow team produces, identify bottlenecks, implement improvement, measure success, and drive a better ServiceNow ROI.
Release Packaging
This principle will be discussed later in this ebook, but having visibility to named and versioned release payloads will dramatically impact your productivity throughput. Release packaging must represent the actual ServiceNow release payload.
User Story Integration
User stories articulate how your planned features and enhancements will deliver value. However, this plan must be integrated with the actual release payload. Planned vs. Actual must be as close to identical as possible.
360° View
You must have a real-time, multi-instance view of every update set, app, plugin, etc., across your entire ecosystem. Without this capability, all your plans are merely academic or theoretical and don't represent reality.
Leverage Platform Engineering Metrics
Measure your performance based on lead time to delivery, lead time to production, and deployment frequency.
- Lead time to delivery measures the time it takes from a feature/enhancement request to its being released to production.
- Lead time to production measures the time it takes for a feature/enhancement to be released to production after it has been migrated to your lowest QA/Test instance.
- Deployment frequency includes the deployment frequency between all instances (e.g., Dev to QA, QA to Prod, etc.).