CapstoneTeamProdigy

Simplifying Microsoft’s BCDR workflows with ServiceNow Integration.

Project Overview 
The objective of the project is to assess the ServiceNow BCDR module and conduct a gap analysis comparing ServiceNow's out-of-the-box capabilities with Microsoft's current workflows around BCDR requirements. The project team will be responsible for exploring the real business procedures and platforms, identifying gaps between required use cases and out-of-the-box ServiceNow solutions, and providing an analysis report.

Target Users
‍The stakeholders involved in the project include prospective product managers, user experience researchers/designers, technical writers, and cybersecurity professionals. These stakeholders will work together to investigate the new platform by exploring its capabilities, identifying usability gaps, and providing an analysis report. The project will enable Microsoft to transition from siloed processes towards an integrated, centralized platform for the BCDR workstreams of Microsoft Mixed Reality GRC.

Our 3-step approach

Familiarise with the domain knowledge and conduct Think-Aloud Usability tests

We did some background research to understand the problem space of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. We did this to ensure we had some basic context when the project sponsor would talk about the project or provide us with details. We used some materials provided by our sponsor and also secondary literature from the internet to form an understanding. We held a meeting with our sponsor to first understand "why does BCDR exist in an organization".

Prioritise feature requirements using the MoSCOW framework

We used our analysis of the BCM lead's usability test, and the language used in the documentation to categorize features by priority using the MoSCoW framework. This step was the focal point for scoping out our project. A shortcoming with this step, however, was that the framework we chose didn't fit the problem very well. We pivoted and decided to stick to a simple prioritization classification wherein we labelled the critical features P0, the nice to have features as P1 and out of scope features as P2.

Analyse functionalities provided by ServiceNow

We set up a meeting with 2 members from the ServiceNow team through which they would provide us with a demo walkthrough of the tool and the out-of-the-box capabilities provided in it. We also used this call as an opportunity to present our specific feature and functionality-related questions from our own analysis to the ServiceNow team. Not only did this help us map the P0 features between both tools, but also led us to discover additional functionality available in the out-of-the-box capabilities of ServiceNow’s tools that could be implemented by Microsoft making their BCDR workstreams more efficient.

Impact and Benefits

Comprehensive gap analysis report

We delivered a gap analysis report clearly which clearly stated what gaps were identified, along with the recommendation on the enhancement required for each gap to our sponsors.

Discovery of additional features

We identified additional features available in the ServiceNow’s out-of-box capabilities to help Microsoft increase team throughput and disaster recovery capability. One of them was the “Natural Disaster Impact Geographic Location”.

Reduced implementation time

By facilitating a communication channel between ServiceNow’s Solution Architects and the MS BCDR lead we were able to reduce time to implementation of migrating towards a new software.