When I joined ServiceNow around three years ago I was largely unfamiliar with all its features, especially its capabilities as a platform to develop apps, and the modules available to manage a project.
Prior to joining ServiceNow I had only used Jira to manage my Agile projects, and I was quite surprised to learn that ServiceNow had similar functionality. After using the Agile Development suite for around three years I’ve come to appreciate the powerful set of features that come with it, and how handily it works with some of the other ServiceNow features to manage a project end to end.
In recent days I’ve been toying around with a personal project to create an app that can help me track my Bonsai trees, and it occurred to me that this could be a useful example for me to illustrate the various ServiceNow apps that you can use to manage this project as well as build it!
The pre-requisite to do this is to install the Agile Software Development plugin in your environment. Once you have this you can go ahead, and create everything that is needed to structure your effort. \
Create a Product, Epic and Stories
For this project I am going to use a simple hierarchy with product at the topic, epics rolling up to products, and finally user stories that will be built into working pieces of code.
You can create a product by navigating to Agile Development –> Products –> New and creating a product from there.
The next thing you do is to create a set of epics which are large user stories, and then finally user stories that will describe what a user wants. I think this structure is simple enough that will satisfy a lot of your corporate needs as well, and unless you have specific needs don’t add another entity to the mix. The modules for creating an epic and a story are also present under Agile Development as shown in the screenshot below, and in the short video that is embedded in the post I show you a working example of how I did this for my project.
Once you have the structure setup you need to create sprints, and manage the execution of this project, and that will be the topic for my next post.