The Power of Consistency in the Quest for Success

The path to success is often opaque or hidden, but its outcome is often a grand, singular event, like winning a gold medal, a championship, or a flash of innovation. However, while these moments are undoubtedly significant, the underlying force that truly fuels success is something less glamorous yet profoundly impactful: consistency. While occasional bursts of effort and inspiration are beneficial, the regular, consistent grind builds the path to success.

The Power of Habit

In his bestselling book "Atomic Habits," James Clear delves deep into how habits shape our lives. He suggests that our results are the product of countless small decisions and actions made consistently over time. Success isn't a single defining act but a series of habitual behaviors. Can we instill "habits" into our ServiceNow tech stack? 

Consistency is a bedrock foundation for achieving anything significant. Dwyane "The Rock" Johnson says, "Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency." Or, as Aristotle wisely said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." Our consistent actions prove our reliability, building trust within and around us.

Consistency in Our ServiceNow Tech Stack

All of this may sound great for people, but what about machines? What about your ServiceNow tech stack? We have learned from our customers that the most significant contributing factor to delivering on the Now platform at speed is the need for more consistency between your ServiceNow instances. Many symptoms are manifest from environment inconsistencies and tend to include:

• Spend time building spreadsheets to build cross-instance visibility.
• Excessive cloning to reduce environment inconsistencies.
• Multi-day production release planning meetings.
• Resolving errors and conflicts with the last update set wins.
• Considering building a custom solution to solve the problem.
• Growing undeployed backlog.
• Not delivering quickly enough to meet business timelines.

Resistance From Inconsistencies

Inconsistency within any system creates an opposition force. This pushback is because inconsistencies can often lead to confusion, mistrust, or inefficiencies. Confusion will come from a lack of real-time visibility across all of your ServiceNow instances because you don't know what is where. Inefficiencies arise as ServiceNow pros unnecessarily spend time resolving migration failures, errors, and conflicts when this resolution effort occurs days, weeks, or months after an update set or app was developed initially.

Timing Is Everything

The timing for error discovery is critical to optimizing your update set throughput. Why? Because between the time a developer completes an update set and a failure, error, or conflict is discovered, the developer has moved on to the next update set - or two or three. Problem resolution requires them to go to the Wayback machine and remember the context and nuance of the development effort contributing to the current issue. 

Of course, our customers also tell us that under the pressure of production releases, ServiceNow pros tend to simply promote the last update set rather than spend time troubleshooting and resolving the errors. This practice isn't done because these professionals are lazy. They practice last-update-set-wins because it is often the only they can meet the release windows - troubleshooting takes too long. It takes too long because of a lack of consistency.

ServiceNow Environment Consistency

Consistency across all your ServiceNow instances is the bedrock of success. Multi-environment visibility and bidirectional synchronization ensure your ServiceNow pros act based on accurate information and that they develop in and propagate to instances that are as production-like as possible. Environment consistency improves the quality of work your ServiceNow teams perform and increases their production capacity. These improvements will allow your ServiceNow teams to deliver on the Now platform at speed and meet business expectations.

‍