Empowering Growth: How a ServiceNow Mentorship Group Flourished

In February, we shared a post highlighting the benefits of ServiceNow, a cloud-based platform RELI Group uses to streamline IT services, operations and business management for several of our federal customers. The versatility and capabilities of this platform has led several RELI Group employees to pursue their ServiceNow certification, spawning the creation of an employee-led ServiceNow mentorship group.

It all started when Joel Pacheco, a ServiceNow developer, mentored Brooke Bonnar as she pursued her ServiceNow certification. Brooke’s success sparked an idea – why not create a mentorship group to extend this opportunity to others?

With the support of sector leadership, Joel worked with several other members of the ServiceNow team to develop a curriculum to guide the group’s sessions. The team includes:

• Pavan Devineni, a ServiceNow developer who’s worked with the platform at RELI group for five years on contracts with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid

• Adriana Barrientos Matlock, a project coordinator who managed all the scheduling and documentation

• Marti Nansen, a front-end ServiceNow user who taught himself how to build dashboards and decided to pursue his certification after Brooke’s success

• Brooke Bonnar, one of the first RELI employees to be mentored and go on for certification

While ServiceNow offers its own path to certification, which can be completed in about a month, it’s a fairly passive process with chapters to read and videos to watch. The mentorship team opted to follow the fundamentals course provided by ServiceNow, but gave each participant their own developer instance of ServiceNow. This allowed mentees to put what they were learning into practice right away, providing the hands-on learning that’s essential to mastering new skills.

The sessions delved into various facets of ServiceNow, from data modeling to dashboard creation. “Practical exercises and real-world scenarios made the learning experience approachable and relatable,” Marti reflected, emphasizing the group’s commitment to practical applications of skills.

As part of pursuing his ServiceNow certification, Marti used his developer instance to build MusicNow, a comprehensive database he uses to track each album, artist and song he listens to. The team opted to use MusicNow as the basis for the mentorship group, giving participants an easy platform to customize and expand.

Joel, wanting to master ServiceNow’s app-building capabilities, used the App Engine to build a workflow that called out to a music database and automatically added an artist summary every time a new artist was added to MusicNow. The team worked through building tables to organize data, like artists, band members and the instruments they played, albums, genres, and songs.

Once they had the data organized, the group talked about relationships between the data – how do you handle a member who’s in multiple bands? What if they play more than one instrument? Can an album fit into more than one genre? This helped the group explore column and data types, essential to managing data effectively.

Next, the group focused on functionality. Thinking through a top-down flow, the group created forms so you could add members from the artist view, add instruments from the member view, and so forth. This made the system work more effectively and intuitively. This expanded to building menus and using modules to make common tasks easier to access.

With all this data and functionality built out, the group moved on to mastering dashboards, one of ServiceNow’s essential features. “We build dashboards to answer key questions quickly,” Marti explained. “You can’t always see the answers when you’re looking at a table of data.” This also spurred lots of conversation about how dashboards could be used on existing contracts.

As the mentorship group continued toward certification, participants explored advanced features like business rules and workspace customization. “Each session was a stepping stone towards mastering the platform,” Pavan remarked, underscoring the group’s dedication to continuous improvement.

A testament to the group’s success, four members successfully achieved their ServiceNow certification! But the group was about more than just checking some boxes – its success extended beyond certification. “It fostered a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing,” Joel observed, highlighting the camaraderie that developed among the members as they brainstormed ways to streamline workflows and enhance productivity in their day-to-day work.

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, mentorship initiatives like this serve as beacons of growth and empowerment. Through dedication, collaboration, and a shared passion for innovation, the team demonstrated the transformative power of mentorship in shaping the future of ServiceNow professionals. The group is eager to begin mentoring the next round of participants, making RELI Group an even more robust provider of ServiceNow expertise!

Want to learn more about how ServiceNow can streamline operations and create efficiencies for your organization? Contact us today to get started!