nullEDGE - Practical technical governance with Jacques Clement

Trying to make hundreds and hundreds of notifications coherent in a ServiceNow instance has been the closest I’ve been to craziness as a developer.

Jacques Clément gives advice on how to achieve cohesion in your platform, focusing on his experience setting technical boards for multiple clients.

Key takeaways

The basics

Using a Catalog item in Employee Center to create architecture board requests.
Weekly technical board meeting aligned with 2-week sprints. Emergency sessions if needed.
Everything is backed by evolving technical guidelines (integrations, coding patterns, notifications). Decisions are documented as well.

Just adding a new field

I loved the example about addressing the typical requirement of “just adding a new field” from 3 different perspectives:

Business: Why? (needing a new flag is not a proper justification)
Technical: Naming, type, mandatory, audit, indexes…
User experience: Label, hint, in which interfaces do we need to show it?

How to run a technical board meeting

The technical board doesn’t live in isolation, but you need to start somewhere.

Just make sure that:

It’s a safe space that people want to attend.
It doesn’t become a top-down control mechanism.
The best ideas win.

As a side note, the presentation reminded me of when we evaluated peers during the CTA: slides as visual support, no walls of text, following all the recommendations they gave us. If I had to score it, I’d give it the highest marks in every section!