My ServiceNow Story: Paul Grupe, Service Delivery Manager
Updated: Feb 1, 2021
The team at GlideFast Consulting is full of passionate, skilled, and enthusiastic developers and architects. If there is one thing that we all have in common, it is our love for the ServiceNow platform and community. “My ServiceNow Story” is a blog series that will give you an inside look of the work and lives of the consultants at GlideFast Consulting and how they started and built their careers in the industry. Our consultants will share their stories with you and will lead you down the path that brought them to where they are today.
This ServiceNow story will be about Paul Grupe, a Service Delivery Manager based out of Dallas, Georgia.
How were you first introduced to ServiceNow? What was your first job using the platform?
I was first introduced to ServiceNow in 2014 when I joined Aaron’s Inc. as a Help Desk Analyst. During my time in this role, I was approached and asked if I had any interest in joining the ServiceNow team. At the time, there were no developers for the platform in house and all we were using was incident, problem, and change to support the company.
My first experience learning about the platform beyond ITIL, was the 3-day Fundamentals class offered by ServiceNow. After the class, another associate and I were tasked with creating the first service request and it was not a simple one! It required integrations via spreadsheets with an outside company but would streamline the way the company ordered credit card machines.
Once that project concluded, we moved onto building out the self-service portal in CMS. For those of you who have only known Service Portal, consider yourself lucky! The main goal was to prevent calls to the help desk and drive everybody to self-service.
Before this point, everything was considered an incident. After going live, we noticed the call volume dropping dramatically to the point where they were able to remove analysts from the help desk and build out a monitoring team. We continued to build out the self-service portal with more requests as well as automated ones.
In April of 2017, I decided to take the next step in my career and join GE Digital who was building out a ServiceNow team.
They had ServiceNow from the early days and it was extremely customized which made it very difficult to complete updates. We took 6 months and did a full implementation onto a new instance in order to streamline processes and upgrades. This instance had over 14,000 process users! I also got the privilege to architect out REST integrations that drove the self-service procurement system. These API’s were averaging over two million API calls a week. I also supported rolling out a new U.S helpdesk in order to insource all helpdesk activities.
It was not until November of 2018 that I was introduced to Mike Lombardo. I heard about GlideFast Consulting during the Knowledge conference and had seen some of the work they were doing previously.
After having a conversation one evening with him, I knew I had to join the team. Working for a ServiceNow partner had always been something I wanted to do, and the timing aligned perfectly.
The excitement, energy, and collaboration is nothing like I have seen before. Being founded by ServiceNow architects who understand the platform in and out helps to drive success. I have grown my skillset so much since being here and there is a constant encouragement and support to learn more.
I currently hold 20 ServiceNow certifications and continue to learn every day!
What are your main ServiceNow skills?
I love to solve some of the hardest problems for our clients. It could be a new requirement that a customer is trying to solve or troubleshooting a complex integration. I really enjoy working through any kind of integration.
I currently hold implementation certifications for Discovery, ITSM, and PPM. I am a certified System Administrator along with a certified application developer. I have all 14 micro certs that are available today and I have the ITSM Suite certification.
What are your plans for the future in your career and in the ServiceNow industry?
I absolutely love the work I am doing here at GlideFast Consulting and plan to be here for a long time. Being able to see the success our customers have is absolutely amazing. GlideFast also gives me the opportunity to never stop learning, which is why I am working on expanding my skills set in the ITOM world. I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
Interested in working with experts like Paul on the GlideFast Consulting team? Reach out to us here. We would love to learn more about your ServiceNow challenges and how we can help your organization build better solutions.