James' Professional Projects

CalHEERS is the California Healthcare Enrollment, eligibility, and Retention System.

This was my first project with Accenture, where I started as an associate analyst on 2/1/2015. 

By 9/1/2019, I was an application development specialist, which is three step-levels higher.

• Read and followed BMC's Step by Step guide to building a CMDB

• Completely rewrote and maintained technical operations and maintenance documentation for the CMDB, taking it forward then on through annual review and approval cycles, keeping it up to date as changes to process occurred. This included maintaining the data model design and other design docs for the CMDB

• Installed and maintained MID Servers myself, and I lead the work requested from our service provider who owned the ServiceNow instance to implement the desired data model and discovery patterns

• Closed project risk of not having a CMDB by establishing and maintaining a configuration management plan, which was integrated with ServiceNow out of the box discovery service and tightly coupled with ServiceNow's Change Management processes

• Trained and managed an offshore team of 3, who audited change requests for CMDB issues, assisted with quarterly baseline collection, and helped me triage of the quarterly audit findings I complied --> I also used performance metrics gathered from my own review process of the offshore CMDB team's work to successfully drive better performance

I served ad-hoc requests for upper management and many of the technical teams across the project. I eventually took over the production of the weekly helpdesk incident SLA reporting. 

Notable reporting/analytics projects:

• Built an excel file validator that could be loaded with befits data for users, and it would detect a series of 11 errors that could occur on them (e.g. overlapping coverage between diff people on the same account)

• Automated weekly SLA reports: what used to take 12 hours, now done in 45 min (using Excel with ODBC driver connected to ServiceNow, and macros to baseline metrics). Led creation of new reports and improving many reports on the way (e.g. excluding top and bottom x% of outliers)

• Automated the weekly incident SLA reports generation process, using EXCEL, with ODBC Drivers connected to ServiceNow, and macros to baseline the metrics weekly (we did not have performance analytics subscription). My predecessor would reserve 2 days to do this activity weekly, I got it down to an hour and a half without impacting how the report's looked at the end of the day

• Worked with requirements from Release Management and Build and Deploy teams to build an environments and release map (in Excel), that would auto maintain a matrix of which environments which be loaded with which versions(release) of the CalHEERS app at which dates

I studied for and obtained my ServiceNow system admin certification. Along the way, I wrote some excellent scripts that ran as condition for scheduled reports for our CalHEERS instance of ServiceNow:

• Some of these scripts would merely update the body of the report to have complex/dynamic verbiage, or that dynamically update the recipients of the scheduled report record based on the records in the report at the time of execution (e.g. assigned to users) 

• One of the scripts looked at open problems by error code, and then looked for unlinked open incidents that had the same error code. The script linked the two, auto addressing (putting on hold) 20% of the incidents raised the following 6 months. This rain daily. The results were summarized into the body of the scheduled report (HTML encoded), which included a list of everything resolved, as well as a flag and CC for any problem owners where we had a conflict of multiple problems with the same error code (incidents not auto resolved in those cases)

CalSAWS is the California Statewide Automated Welfare System.

RGS (Regional Government Services) is my current employer.

My RGS title is Project Advisor, though my CalSAWS title is Technical Analyst I.

I stayed with CalSAWS, but switched from Accenture to RGS because of the growing backlog of enhancements for ServiceNow that I wanted to work, and frustration with Accenture's management, and inability to staff me to work those enhancements, despite over a year of trying. 

As soon as I joined RGS, I quickly mastered the normal expected duties of a Consortium Helpdesk Analyst (also started optimizing knowledge and fulfillment of those processes) and then started working towards opening up development access. By 3/1/2023, I had agreement from both CalSAWS and Accenture to allow met to do ServiceNow development, and had built a Jira project to track it all, migrating all of our existing work/backlog out of offline items and from ServiceNow idea portal. 

For several months, it appeared I had created the dream job for myself. 

The only downside was that development was something that I typically did only on Fridays, after spending the majority of the week burning down normal help-desk duties. That, and the fact that I didn't get a pay increase to go along with my new development role.

I bring subject matter expertise to design doc reviews related to ServiceNow. I make sure that the solutions I approve are secure, have the end user in mind (requirements, use cases, end-to-end process, training, documentation, communication) and that is easy for future admins to maintain. I understand the technical side of it so I can look out for and suggest opportunities reduce technical debt, for example:

• Our vendor wanted to modify many out of the box ServiceNow ACLS for the itil role, to restrict it in many ways for a subset of users. I insisted instead, they make a new role that has all new ACLs that only grant access to those users need.
• Our vendor wanted to prevent offshore users from ever getting the ‘itil’ role specifically. Instead, I suggested (which they agreed to) creating a list of allowed roles for offshore users, and having the system prevent offshore users from getting ANY other role except the roles in that list.

I'm also lead approver for the consortium helpdesk team. This includes 3 quality gates that I baked into our SDLC - more info below.

I do project management of the ServiceNow initiatives using Jira, which means now the Consortium maintain backlogs and sprint alignment. 

• I designed the ServiceNow project in Jira to track the pipeline of efforts and included 3 quality gates where consortium team must review and provide approval: 1) before starting to develop, 2) before going live, and 3) before closing the story. I provided requirement to the Jira Admins to build out the tables and workflows in Jira, but then I configured and maintain the main Jira board (all the filters, visible fields on which screens) and created 3 dashboards for viewing this data 

• I estimated and groomed the backlog of 152 stories to be initially imported into the Jira project for the ServiceNow development pipeline, by assigning user business value, time criticality, risk reduction, and size/complexity score to each story, I implemented a weighted priority system called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), which comes from the scaled agile framework methodology. I also created the Jira automation job to auto calculate the WSFJ for all stories value moving forward. 

• I maintain the documentation (technical excel info and, and power point walk-through),

• From 3/1/23-3/1/24 I acted as SCRUM master for the SDLC, facilitating weekly meetings with the implementation vendor, as well as our monthly sprint review and planning sessions.

• I am primary story synthesizer/crystalizer for our SDLC, working with regional managers, tier 3 staff, and county staff to collect and document their requirements, creating at least 50 more enchantments and defects since our SDLC go live on 3/1/23. I also organize these into Epics and help coordinate timing and sprint alignment with leadership.

Setting up the SDLC enabled me to participate in it as a developer, but only after my normal technical analyst duties were met. I had gotten my sys_admin access back in all environments.

From 3/1/24 -11/1/24 I completed 37 stories (over 11 releases) that will leave a lasting impact at CalSAWS. 

During this time, I leveraged my sys_admin access to include a code review of all the vendor implemented changes to ServiceNow as part of our SDLC testing quality gate approval step, validating against defects in code and/or automated test scripts. 

Notable Development Projects/Stories

• Extended ServiceNow-Jira integration, and refactored ServiceNow case-incident-problem workflow so that when cases, incidents are linked to a system change request (i.e. an enhancement request) then the ServiceNow case and incidents become resolved. The existing integration was a messy conglomerate of 15+ scripts, most of which doing duplicate work. I cleaned all that up and moved all the integration logic to a single script include with multiple functions, and included an anti-polling feature to avoid over-calling Jira for repeated updates to the same ticket in too short of a window (sys_property configurable). Documented everything!

• Extended a custom security plan of action and milestones (POA&M) application, adding requirement of mandatory fields, auditing, prevention of record deletion, and introducing role based access control into the ACLs and UI actions (previously, everything was hard coded to group sys_is, making it hard to extend in the future). There was also no automated test scripts for this application, so I took it upon myself to write those out (discovering and working through ATF defect with now platform along the way)

• Created a workflow for a catalog item that was previously manually routed around and approved manually. This was for Employee Name Changes, which has fulfillment subtasks for up to 5 different teams/applications. 

• Enhanced workflow for existing catalog item, to leverage DocuSign integration (integration hub spoke) to replace need of manual signing and attaching files. I installed the spoke and got the integration working perfectly with this catalog item in our dev and test instances, but ran into issues on DocuSign side with production go live.

• Enhanced region based reporting capabilities, by creating interactive filters based on region, and exposing ACLs (fixing defect) to allow users to self service report on tickets by region (not just county). Also created new role for Regional Mangers to make it easier to share reports with all the RMs. This included report_global and report_scheduler role, as well as a recorded training session about using these roles, empowering them to work with and facilitate better reporting within their counties. 

• Being on such high volume fulfillment and approval team, I am getting more experience reporting with RGS than I did with Accenture. I work closely with the regional managers and the managers of our Tier 3 teams to make sure they are getting the data they need in easy dashboard form

I am proliferating the use of our performance analytics at CalSAWS, finding ways to use it on almost every dashboard I modify, and teaching about its capabilities whenever I get the opportunity. I am also close friends with our quality assurance team from ClearBest, and help them with reporting in ServiceNow often. That said, I try to teach as I go, recording sessions, and expanding our knowledge base wherever possible. 

UAR Process Improvements

I drastically improved the 'User Access Review' process since inheriting it from rolling off and transitioning team members in Jan of 2024.

• This is a process that involves looking at a baseline of our identity management tool, and approving all the user-role combinations and definitions matrix for what every role can do.   
•  It was all manually reviewed and approved in typically an hour each month, done more or less gut feeling alone, despite involving what I'm seeing as 24k rows of data over the last 3 months.   
• My solution was to build an excel processor that, via macro, opens up 3 input excel files with 20+ tabs each, and consolidated them into 2 master tables holding data across all periods. 
• This allows me to report on just the differences between one period and the next, and apply global policies to the data. Now we're reporting on all known types of issues and all changes to access, and tracing all of those to approvals or remediation.