u/thinkdeepforinsights

Feels like half the gap between fast and slow SN devs is just tooling. Here's what I'm using — curious what the community has that I'm missing.

SN Utils — if you're not on this already, stop what you're doing. Background script runner, field watcher, instance compare, debug panel. Should've been native. Isn't. Use it anyway.

VS Code + snippets library for writing Business Rules and Script Includes locally. Keep a personal library of GlideRecord patterns, REST scaffolding, and error handling templates so you're not rewriting boilerplate every engagement.

Custom MCP server through REST calls scoped to SN components — feeds the AI context about your specific catalog items, flows, business rules, and table schema before it writes anything. Makes a huge difference vs. just prompting Claude cold for a how-to-guide. Decently better than using SN's built in MCP server that tracks your usage and inflates your Reviewer license fees at renewal.

Update set hygiene script that enforces naming conventions on export (timestamp + ticket + scope). Boring until you're debugging across versions later.

Still haven't solved: Flow Designer automation & debugging, cross-scope dependency hell, and upgrade skipped records at scale.

What's in your toolkit? Especially interested in any self-made tools that you just have for optimizing your day to day work.

Asking for a friend. They just signed an offer to start with a boutique ServiceNow partner and they were given a preference before provisioning a laptop. I've used a Mac for my development work, but I'm curious what the community uses day-to-day and if there's actually a meaningful difference for SN implementation work.

I'm doing research on how ServiceNow implementations actually get deployed and run in the real world. Not the official documentation version — the actual version.

Looking to talk with developers who've been deploying and maintaining ServiceNow implementations for 3+ years. I want to understand the full arc: how scoping works, where things go sideways, how you handle upgrades, how often you see integrations, post-go-live maintenance, how is the culture of your firm — all of it!

45 minutes or less on Zoom. $50 gift card (Uber, Papa Johns, Cold Stone, your pick from a list!) for your time.

No sales pitch, guaranteed. I'll send you the broad question ahead of time so you know what you're walking into. DM me or drop a comment and I'll follow up.

Curious what people have actually deployed Strategic Portfolio Management for outside the standard IT portfolio / Agile delivery use case.

Most of the content out there focuses on SPM sitting on top of ITSM — demand management, resource capacity, project tracking for IT initiatives. That's the obvious lane. But I keep hearing about teams using it for things pretty far outside that — legal matter intake, facilities project tracking, M&A pipeline management, that kind of thing.

Makes sense when you think about it. The underlying primitives (demand intake, resource modeling, portfolio visibility, executive reporting) aren't inherently IT-specific. But I'm curious whether it actually holds up in practice when you push it into those domains, or whether people end up fighting the platform to make it work.

What have you seen deployed in the wild? Did it stick, or did the team eventually migrate back to something purpose-built?