Customer: Nonprofit Academic Medical Center

The client is a world-renowned academic medical center known for their cutting-edge research and patient-centric approach. Widely recognized as a leader in medical education and innovation, the client sought to maintain their high standards of excellence across all their areas of the organization—including their five ServiceNow instances.Their leadership is deeply committed to empowering their team with tools that foster operational excellence and innovation across their organization, including their five ServiceNow instances.

In terms of applications on ServiceNow, the client has their facilities and medical device management software running on the platform. They also manage all their EHR knowledge on ServiceNow, enabling physicians to access information about their EHR directly through the platform.

They have a fairly large development team, consisting of 20 members between support and development. They also have a citizen development program and use implementation partners, so they can have up to 9 additional people working on their platform at any given time.

Needless to say, they required a robust and efficient system to manage their extensive ServiceNow development operations. The client needed a smooth error-free, and reliable deployment process. Accomplishing that is only possible with the implementation of consistent coding standards to both internal, external and citizen development teams. Despite their highly capable development team, they recognized the need for a more streamlined and efficient system. Their commitment to continuous improvement and forward-thinking mindset led them to seek stronger governance to handle their growing and complex environment. The team knew that by reducing technical debt, they could not only save valuable time but also empower their developers to innovate without roadblocks.

Key Results with Quality Clouds:

• 102,000issues fixed

• 2 full time employees worth of savings

• 21,000 hours of technical debt prevented

  
  

The Challenge: Manual Code Reviews and Feedback Issues

Because of the size of their teams and the complexity of their environment, the client’s development process was difficult to manage with their available resources. As such, maintaining consistent code quality and compliance was a challenge.

The client also wanted to move faster, but they didn't have the time to conduct manual code reviews, given the size of their team and the complexity of their environment. Manually reviewing code and going through hundreds of rules on every update simply wasn't feasible.

Additionally, their organization's culture was non-confrontational, so team members found it difficult to give direct feedback on code quality. Without Quality Clouds, such issues would've led to broader challenges, including:

• Increased technical debt, impacting productivity and innovation

• Escalating time and costs for staff to perform manual code reviews

• Higher risk of performance issues

• Difficulty in maintaining and evolving their ServiceNow instances

• Hurdles with upgrading or adding new features due to accumulated technical debt

The The Desired Solution

While the client already had a solid development team, they needed stronger governance to streamline the development process. With the large number of team members and the extensive volume of code changes, they required a solution that could “gate” below-standard-level-code from production, while automating reviews when needed. That way, The client could make the review process easier while ensuring code quality at every turn.The client, driven by their visionary approach to innovation and operational efficiency, implemented Quality Clouds to empower their teams with the autonomy they needed to thrive. With Quality Clouds automating much of the review and compliance process, developers were free to focus on delivering high-quality, innovative solutions rather than getting bogged down by manual reviews.

“With gating, code cannot move off our development environment without passing Live Check. Quality Clouds serves as an unbiased gatekeeper so that anything failing the check is reviewed before moving forward.”- Platform Architect Gating code required special rulesets and best practices for their ServiceNow environment. That way, whether codes were coming from the client’s internal teams, external partners, or external developers, the process remained easy to manage and less chaotic.

“It [Quality Clouds] removes the need for having another developer or an architect review code. Nobody could go through 400 rules on every update or code change that we're looking at.” - Platform Architect

To that end, they adopted Quality Clouds and took the following steps:

• Introduced Best Practices from Quality Clouds and configured them based onindustry standards and their specific needs

• Gated any code that didn’t adhere to best practices through Quality Gates

• Automated write-off review using Quality Clouds’ Peer Review capabilities

• Used Live Check to prevent new code from causing problems

• Saved thousands of development hours

• Automate and streamline their development processBuild Better on

The Resolution: Robust Governance, Accelerated Development and Reduced Debt

The client embraced Quality Clouds' suite of ServiceNow solutions to address their needs. LiveCheck, Peer Review, and Quality Gate altogether enabled them to speed up application development while significantly reducing technical debt.

Specifically:

LiveCheck allowed developers to validate their code in real-time as they are writing it. That way, teams could spot and fix coding errors and security issues before code makes it to production.

Meanwhile, Peer Review offered another layer of checks in the event that codes get gated due to non-adherence to best practices. When these instances come up, the platform owner or architect can use Quality Cloud’s Peer Review tool (instead of manually coordinating with developers) to approve or reject the write-off requests. The Peer Review workflow enables developers to work more autonomously, allowing senior reviewers to dedicate their time to high-priority business projects.

Finally, Quality Gates enabled the client to enforce rigorous controls on their development processes so that it’s impossible for sub-standard code to be moved to the next environment/ This is particularly true for high impact and severity issues; if these critical issues are flagged by the automated Peer Review, they are immediately blocked from progressing.Build Better on

For instance, their facilities management and device management app, which sits on top of ServiceNow, runs through Quality Clouds for all updates and code scans. Any issues identified are sent back to the vendor for resolution, ensuring the highest performance and reliability.

Quality Clouds has made such a massive impact that the platform is now fully embedded in the client's entire ServiceNow development and operations departments. Every line of code goes through Quality Clouds’ suite of tools, automating code validation, review, and compliance checks. All of these have led to less production chaos and rework, so teams can focus on what they do best: innovating and delivering high-quality solutions.

By embedding Quality Clouds into their processes, the client not only optimized operations but also empowered their team to operate more autonomously and efficiently. This dedication to ongoing improvement has cemented their position as a leader in health innovation, enabling them to focus on what truly matters—delivering world-class patient care.Build Better on

The Impact: Efficiency and cost savings equivalent to 2 FTEs

By implementing Quality Clouds’s suite of tools, the client realized savings equivalent to two full-time employees. Not only did Quality Clouds free up valuable time and resources, it also paved the way for faster development. This helps the client enhance innovation and sustain a competitive advantage—which is crucial given that they operate in the academic medical field. The impact of Quality Clouds extended far beyond operational efficiency. By saving the equivalent of two full-time employees, the client was able to reinvest these resources into higher-value projects. This reflects their long-term vision and commitment to empowering their team to innovate at the highest level, ensuring sustained competitive advantage in the academic medical field.

Operationally speaking, the client significantly improved their resource allocation and team efficiency. Prior to Quality Clouds, they had a larger number of developers and operations teams to serve as admins overseeing code. With Quality Clouds’ help, the client streamlined how teams operate, reducing the need to add additional admin team members and instead focus their efforts back on the development process.