Get Started with ServiceNow Visual Task Board (VTB) | Ali Saghaeian | Skillshare

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Get Started with ServiceNow Visual Task Board (VTB)

teacher avatar Ali Saghaeian, ServiceNow Implementation Specialist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Introduction

      3:59

    • 2.

      (Guided Board) Navigating ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      8:14

    • 3.

      (Guided Board) Managing Tasks with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      7:44

    • 4.

      (Freeform Board) Working with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      7:28

    • 5.

      (Freeform Board) Adding Tasks to ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      6:24

    • 6.

      (Flexible Board) Creating and Working with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      6:08

    • 7.

      (Flexible Board) Dynamic Task Management with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards

      6:44

    • 8.

      Comparing ServiceNow Visual Task Boards (VTBs)

      8:59

    • 9.

      Class Conclusion

      2:53

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About This Class

This class will guide you through transforming your task lists into interactive, drag-and-drop boards. Imagine a digital whiteboard that's smarter and seamlessly integrated with your ServiceNow data, allowing you to visualize your workflow, manage projects, and collaborate more effectively.

What You'll Learn

This comprehensive class will take you from the basics to advanced techniques. You will master the essentials of Visual Task Boards (VTBs) and learn how to:

  • Explore VTB Types: Understand the key differences between Freeform, Guided, and Flexible boards, and learn when to use each for maximum impact.

  • Create & Configure: Build boards from scratch, tailored to your specific needs.

  • Manage Tasks: Effortlessly add, update, and manage task cards with descriptions, attachments, and checklists.

  • Customize Your View: Organize your workflow with lanes, swimlanes, and labels, and even set "Work in Progress" limits to stay focused.

  • Collaborate Effectively: Add team members to your boards, assign tasks, and track changes through the Activity Stream to keep everyone on the same page.

  • Integrate with ServiceNow Data: Learn how to pull in existing records, such as incidents or change requests, and understand how moving cards can impact the underlying data.

  • Stay Organized: Keep your workspace tidy by archiving tasks and lanes on Freeform boards.

Why You Should Take This Class

In today's complex workflows, maintaining clarity and efficiency is crucial. Visual Task Boards are a powerful tool within ServiceNow that can help you and your team stay organized and focused. By the end of this course, you'll be able to leverage VTBs to bring clarity, efficiency, and better collaboration to your daily work, creating tailored board experiences that fit your exact needs.

Who This Class is For

  • Anyone who uses or is interested in using ServiceNow
  • Project Managers, Team Leads, IT Support Professionals

  • Individual contributors looking to enhance personal productivity

  • Anyone interested in using Kanban boards or Visual Task Boards (VTBs)

No prior experience with Visual Task Boards is necessary! We'll start with the basics and build your knowledge step by step.

Materials/Resources

  • Access to a ServiceNow test or personal developer instance is recommended to follow along with the topics and participate in the class project.

Meet Your Teacher

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Ali Saghaeian

ServiceNow Implementation Specialist

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Class Introduction: I am Ale Zagaan and I bring 19 years of Ike experience, spending the last nine years leading dozens of larger scale service now implementations and digital transformations. In this course, we'll take you on a comprehensive journey through the world of service now visual taskfds. Well, let's start by exploring the different types of visual task words available. Free form boards, perfect for managing your personal tasks. Or when you need maximum flexibility in organizing your work, we'll show you how to create these boards, add private tasks, and even bring in existing service now records like incidents or change requests, data driven boards. These boards are connected directly to your service now data. We'll dive into guided boards where lanes are automatically populated, based on record fields like states or priority. These are fantastic for a structured view of your existing processes. Flexible boards offering a blend of data integration and visual freedom. You learn to pull in records based on specific filters and then customize your lanes without altering the underlying data. Across all board types, you'll master essential skills like creating and configuring your boards from scratch, adding, updating and managing task cards, including descriptions, attachments and checklists, customizing your view with lanes and sweep lanes, and even setting working progress limits using labels for better organization and filtering and assigning tasks to yourself or team members. We'll cover how to add members to your boards and share them perfectively. Track activity streams to see what's changing. Navigate board information, use filters and save your favorite boards for quick access. Understanding how moving cards on different board types impacts the underlying service now records, a key concept for effective use and archive tasks on free phone boards to keep your workspace tightly. This course is designed for anyone who uses service now, whether you're a project manager, a team lead, an IT support professional, or individual contributor looking to enhance your personal productivity. No prior VTB expertise is needed. We'll start with the basics and build your knowledge step by step. By the end of this course, you'll not only understand how to use visual taskbards but also how to leverage them to bring clarity, efficiency, and better collaboration to your daily work within service now. You'll be equipped to create tailored board experiences that fit your exact needs, helping you and your team stay organized and focused. So are you ready to transform the way you work in service now? Let's dive in and get us started with visual task force. 2. (Guided Board) Navigating ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: Tired of scattered tasks and endless lists. Get ready to visualize and organize your work like never before. I'll show you the power of visual taskbards. You can access Visual taskbard from the old menu and starting to type the name. You can see it under self service. The first time you access the Visual taskbard, you see a welcome screen. You can create a new board from here. As you can see, you can create either a free phone board or a data driven board. We'll start by creating a data driven board. Let's go for the incident table. I can choose a vertical lane and an optional horizontal lane, which we call swim lane. So let's go for a vertical lane of state. And a swim lane of priority. This way, I can see incidents grouped by state and priority at the same time. At the next screen, I can define some filters. For example, I can say I'm only interested in active incidents. I can also add sorts. For example, I want my incidents to be listed based on creation date in descending order. Based on the filter you apply, you can see the number of cards that will be displayed on the board. Let's keep the activists true and create the visual task for. And here it is. As you can see, the vertical lens show the state, so I can see new in progress on hold, resolved, closed, and canceled. Since I only chose active incidents, I don't see any cards under closed or canceled. And as swim lanes, I can see different priorities, starting with critical, high, moderate, low, planning, which is the lowest priority. There is also a non option, which is not applied. The good thing is I can go to the swim lane menu and hide the lane that I'm not going to monitor. Before we get to the cards and see how they look like, I want to show you how the visual taskbd works. You can actually move the lanes. For example, I can grab a lane and move it to my desired position on the board. I can also set a lane limit. For example, I don't want to see more than five incidents on hold. So that could be a KPI for me. I can see there is a warning since the total number of incidents on this lane is more than five. So this could be a good indication of how many cars we have on this lane and what's our target. Same as swim lanes, I can go and hide vertical lanes. Apart from hiding a lane, you can also collapse them. For example, I can collapse the critical swim lane. I can go back and expand the swim lane whenever I need. On the top banner, there are a few things you can control. First of all, based on the table and the fields that you've selected before creating the board, you can see a default name created for this. In this case, incidence by state and priority. You can simply click on it and update the name. For example, active incidents by state and priority. You can see the type of the board written underneath, so this is a guided board. You can filter the cards by their title or number. For example, I can search for a keyword like access, and I can see all the cards that match my keyboard based on under title. Let's clear the filter for now. The next menu is to show the cards based on their due date. If you've set due dates for your cards, you can easily filter them based on the few options like the tasks that are overdue or they due in a day, a week, a month or so. Next, you see the information icon, which allows you to see the basic information and the filters that you've set for the sport. The star icon allows you to mark your board as favorite, so you can easily find it the next time. Then you can see the basic information such as number of members or assignees, number of lanes, a number of tasks available on this board. You can see the structure of the board and change the settings if you like. You can edit the filter and sorting and then you can share the link to the board with the members of the board. You can also see the list of all tasks in the board in a list view. Let's go back to the board. Then you can see the user's menu. Here, you can see all the members and the task assignees in the board. You can easily promote an assignee to become a member. That way, they will have access to the board and can contribute directly. Alternatively, you can search for the members and add them to the board. Next, you can see the labels. You can tog along the show labels and see the default labels available. You can add a label change the color and toggle it on. You can edit a label and you can turn on or off some labels. Next, you can see the activity is free, and this shows all changes happening to the tasks on this board. And finally, the configuration. This menu allows you to show or hide certain things. For example, hide the names or show SLAs. There is also an advanced settings, which allows you to do further configurations on the board, for example, changing the background color. Or doing some lane configurations. Here, you can choose to show or hide a lane or simply reposition the lanes on the board. You can do the same on swim lanes. In the following videos, we'll look into using some of these functions and managing sub tasks. Stay tuned. 3. (Guided Board) Managing Tasks with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: What if managing all your tasks could be both simple and powerful? In this video, I'll show you how to manage tasks in visual task boards with dragon drop simplicity. Prepare to unlock a new level of organization and collaboration. Let's dive in. On the top of the board, you can see the list of labels, the filter that you can apply on the SLA that we selected. And the list of members and assignees on the board. You can easily drag and drop these on the card. For example, you can select a label and assign it to multiple cards. You can give multiple labels to a card. When it comes to the board members and assignees, you can easily select a user, drag and drop the name to be either the primary assignee or additional assignee. This way, you can easily assign tasks, however you like to one or multiple assignees on the board. Now, let's look at some of these cards and see what options are available for us. If I open one of the cards, I can see some information. For example, changes to the state of the card, the comments left on the card, information about the assignees, the labels allocated to the card, and if there is any due date for this task. Now let's close this and try another card. As you can see, there is an attachment in this card, which I can easily open or download. I can update the short description of the card. I can add to the description of the card, and my changes are immediately reflected. I can leave additional comments, which means customers can see it, or I can tick the box for work notes and leave an internal message. On the right pane, the first tab is a detailed step which we've already looked into. There is the assignee tab, which you can see who the primary assignee of the task is. And if there are any additional assignees, you can add additional assignees or simply promote an additional assignee to become the primary assignee of the task. Next, you see the labels. You can easily go ahead and add a couple of labels, so you can filter them later on the board. The attachment tab shows all the attachments, and you can see a checklist tab. This allows you to add items and take them on or off. Let's add a couple of items. As I'm adding the checklist items, I can see the entries in the work notes. And as I start checking them off, I can see the worknte is being updated to indicate that an on item is checked off. You can remove the whole checklist, or you can save it as template, so you can use it later on on other tasks. This card usually shows the simple view of the record. If you want to update or see additional information, you just need to click on the Hyperlink and the record opens in the default view exactly like how you see it on the platform. You can see all the available fields on the form, plus all the tabs and related lists. You can easily make changes. And update the task. Another way to access this detailed view is the hyperlink number on the card. It opens the card in the default view automatically. The key things about visual taskboard is the interactivity. You can easily share a board with members, provide visibility to all the tasks you're doing, and manage your day to day word. The other good thing about visual taskbard is you can add cards. In this data driven board on incident table, adding card means creating a new incident, and similar to every incident we create on the platform, whether in the classic environment or the workspace UI, you need to fill in all the mandatory fields. Let's make it simple and submit the incident. Since we haven't defined any priority, you shouldn't be expecting to see the card in the default planning priority. You can open the incident again, update impact and urgency to be high. So the priority gets automatically updated to one critical. Now we're going to update this incident by adding a word note. And the card is now listed in the critical swim lane. Same as before, you can assign it. Move the car to the next lane. Rebrder the card in the lane to give it a higher priority in case you want the board members to look at it first. As easy as that. Remember, you can always go to the Information tab and update the filters. For example, remove the condition for the active incident, save the changes, and that refreshes the board, which means you should be able to see both closed and canceled incidents now. When adding members, remember members should have access to the incident table. In this case, you can only add users who have at least read access to the incident table, and that includes all IT users. And as a last note, although you usually receive notifications every time a task is assigned to you, you could also see notifications coming to your inbox if the cards change lanes. And don't forget to check the activity stream every now and then to see the latest changes applied to the board. This was an example of managing tasks in a data driven guided board. In the next videos, we'll look into free form and flexible boards. The journey continues. 4. (Freeform Board) Working with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: Ready to transform the way you work in service now, free full boards are here to change the game. Stick around as I show you how to quickly create, organize, and track your daily tasks and team projects with this powerful visual tool. In this video, we're going to create a free fall board at tasks, manage them, bring in members, and share with them. We've already talked about creating a new board. This time, we're going to create a board from the menu on the top left hand side of the board. You can simply click on the ad board, select your board type, which in this case, is a free phone board, and there you have it. This is the initial default view of the board. Similar to other combin boards, we have three simple lanes to do doing and done. Unlike data driven boards, you can update the lane names. For example, I'm going to change to do to backlog. You can also add lanes and give it a name. Let's add one more lane. We call it testing. You can easily move the lane to your desired position. On the vertical lane menu, you can add cards, set lane limit, height lane, and delete lane. Let's start by adding a card. Adding cards in free form boards create private tasks that are only available to you. I'll add a few more cards. I can easily move cards to different lanes, add members to the board so they can see what I'm working on. Start using labels or do some extra configurations. Let's give the board a name and start adding some descriptions to the cards. Let's assign some of these tasks to the board members. Now, let's add some attachments, drag and drop them on the cards. You can add a few labels. As you can see, the default view of the cards does not provide much information. I cannot see the descriptions of added or the files that I've attached. Although you can open the cards individually and see the information, you can also navigate to the configuration tab and take the show compact cards. This will allow you to see additional information on the card, such as the description, the attachments, and some of the card information, like, who was the last person who updated the card? What's the state of the card or who it is assigned to? I can hide some information and keep the rest now let's open a card and see what we can do. Similar to other board types, you can see certain information. On top of what you can usually do on free form boards, the additional option that is available in the detailed section are the tools that are provided to better manage the tasks. For example, you can archive a task or move it to another free form board or to a different lane on the same board. This time, let's archive the card and see how it looks like. You get a confirmation pop up, and as soon as you confirm, the card disappears from the board. However, you can still access the card by navigating to the information tab and select the view archived tasks. This archive capability is also available at the lane level. For example, you can go to the vertical lane menu and archive all cards in that lane. In the list of archive tasks, you also have the option to restore a card. And the card goes back to the board. Although the default view of free form boards do not provide swim lanes, you can still add swim lanes by toggling it on. Initially, you are provided with one swim lane where you can update the name and add new swim lanes. You can also add sorting. For example, you want to sort the cards based on their creation date, and you can choose either ascending or descending order. Let's save it. You can have multiple sorting applied at once. Another thing I would like to do on a card view is adding checklist items. Let's add a few items. And take off a few of them. Now, if I close this card view, I can see three items have been checked off already. So this is another way to make sure tasks are being completed as planned. We've seen how free phone boards give you incredible power to manage your personal tasks visually. But the real magic happens when you start pulling in work from across service now. Get ready because in the next video, I'm going to expand our free fm boards to include various task types and explore how to manage that consolidated view effectively. Don't miss it. 5. (Freeform Board) Adding Tasks to ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: If you're leveraging ServiceNow's visual task boards, you know how handy they can be. But did you know that free phone boards offer an excellent level of flexibility beyond just private tasks? That's right. You're not limited. In this video, we're diving deep into how you can supercharge your free phone boards by adding various task times, like incidents and change requests. We'll cover adding tasks from a list view and from a task form to see how they all come together. Let's navigate to the list of unassigned open incidents. I can see 16 tasks listed in here. Let me apply a filter and only show incidents that are in new state. Now the list is down to 13 tickets. I can choose one multiple or all tasks at once. Go to the actions menu and add them to a visual task board. In this example, you're only provided with a list of free phone boards where you can add these cards too. Let's choose the board that we've just created, and they're automatically added to my board. Let's go back to the board. By default, any tasks added to a free flow board from a list will be automatically added to the first lane of the board. In this example, I can see all tasks are listed under the backlog lane. I can move some of them to the week two swim lane that I created. And this is done simply by dragging and dropping the cards. Let me move some of my previously created cards to the next line. From this view, I can see both incidents and private tasks are listed on this board. I can go on and add other task types. This time, I'm going to add a change request to this board. Let's go to the list of open changes. Open one of the change requests and right click on the top header. You can see the option to add this particular record to your visual taskbard. Similar to adding tasks from a list view, you can also add tasks from the form view. And you get this confirmation message that this change request has been added. Let's go back to the board. If you scroll down in the backlog lane of the first swim lane, you can see your change requests already added. Since I've applied a sorting based on creation date, and this is one of the older record, I can see this change is down on my list. When I have sorting applied, I cannot manually reorder cards in the same lane since it's being automatically done by my sorting criteria. When you're adding other task types, remember, not all board members may have the right access to view the cards or get assigned to those cards. And you'll probably notice the closed icon on the top right hand side of the cards, and that's our easy way to archive a card without the need to open the card. Unlike data driven boards, you can freely move any task types in the lanes, since changes do not actually make updates to the record itself, so in this case, even if you move our change request to the De lane, it doesn't close the change. It just marks it as done in your board. It still shows us new state on the record and in any new boards that you create. We've already looked into the detailed view of the task in data driven boards like an incident record. You can do the same with private tasks. Let's try and open a private task through the hyperlinked number. By default, you're taken to the VTB view of the task. There is not much information here, apart from the assignment group that you can set up. With a proper access, you are able to switch the view of the form to the default view, and this gives you additional options and the flexibility to add more information and track the progress. For example, change the state, set up a parent record, make someone else as the owner or the assignee of the task. Mark it as active or inactive and easily add short description and description. The good thing about this is you can also see the activity stream and all the changes to this task. So you've seen how easy it is to add different task types to a free foam board, track their progress, and update them undergo. The real power of free foam boards lies in this ability to customize and centralize different work items in one visual space. Feel free to explore further and see how you can make it work for you. That's all for now. See you in the next video. 6. (Flexible Board) Creating and Working with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: Ever wanted to organize your tasks on a custom board without altering the actual records? Flexible boards allow you to pull in tasks or records such as incidents, change requests or project tasks directly from your ServiceNow instance based on the filters that you define. But here is the best part. You get complete control over your boards layout. You can customize your lanes, organize your tasks, exactly how you want without actually changing the wrapper data in the background. So, whether you're managing a personal backlog, coordinating a quick project, or just need a custom view of your team's workload, flexible boards give you the perfect blend of data integration and visual freedom. Let's jump in and see how they work. Here is the list of all visual task boards that I created and I own. You can see I've already created a guided board and a free phone board. Now we're going to create a flexible board. Please note that flexible boards are considered data driven board. Let's select a data driven board option. Select your table. In this case, I'm going to select incident. When it comes to vertical lane field, unlike guided boards, you don't select any field. So let's go with the non option. As you can see, the swim lane field is grade out, since you don't have any vertical lane, you're not presented with any swim lane field option either. Let's go to the next screen. Here is where you define your filters. For example, you're only interested in active incident and those incidents that are in higher priority. So I go and select priority is one of P one critical or P two high. I can go ahead and add sorting, as well, but I'll keep it for now. As you can see, this filter will result in 19 cards. So let's create the board and see how it looks like. As you can see, this is a Cbund board setup, exactly how the free form board looks like. The big difference is, it's data driven nature. The cards that are shown here are coming through the filters that you define. And as you can see, by default, all cards start from the first lane. Similar to free foam boards, you can update the lane names. Let's call it pipeline, add new lanes, move lanes, and perform the actions that you can usually do on a free phone board, such as adding a card, setting lane limits, hiding a lane, or deleting a lane. Let's start by moving some of these cards. Similar to adding tasks to free phone boards, if you open a card, you will see updates such as lane changes, but the actual record on the platform does not change. And you cannot find lane changes updates on the actual record. Since the activity stream only records changes to the field and some record specific updates. Let's close this view. Similar to other board types, you can find some information on the details cap, such as the assignees, the labels, due dates, attachments, and a quick view of the checklist items and the progress. You can update the assignee, including the primary assignment and the additional assignees, add labels, view attachments, edit the name, download it, or delete the attachment. And the last tab refers to the checklist items. As you can see, this incident already had three checklist items. Let's go ahead and check off the last item, and you can see the update is recorded in the activity stream. Let's go back to the board. This card view now shows three of the three checklist items are complete. Unlike free phone boards, you cannot archive a card, but like guided boards, you can hide the lane with all the cards underneath. And that's a wrap on creating your first flexible board. You've learned how to pull in live data and customize your lanes for the perfect visual layout. But how do you manage the board itself and add new tasks? In the next video, we'll dive into board configurations, adding members and watching real time as new incidents appear on a board the moment you're created or updated in service now. You won't want to miss it. See you there. 7. (Flexible Board) Dynamic Task Management with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards: Welcome back. In our previous video, we created our first flexible board, giving us a custom layout for our live service now data. Now it's time to manage it like a pro. In this deep dive, we'll explore all the board level settings from adding members and labels to customizing the look and feel. Most excitingly, you'll see how to add new tasks on the fly and watch your board update in real time as the records change in the background. Let's pick up where we left off. With flexible boards, you have the same capability to assign labels. Assign users to be the primary or additional assignee of the task and filter the cards based on the number or their title. Let me clear the filter, update the board name, and see what we can do at the board level. We'll start by looking into the information tab. Similar to other boards, you can mark it as your favorite, see some basic information, add swim lanes if you need. See the board structure, such as the filters and the sorting that you applied. Apparently, you can update on the go, and you should be expecting the tasks to be updated with every change you make on the filters. On flexible boards, it is not recommended to add a vertical lane, mainly because adding a vertical lane converts it to a guided board and resets the whole configurations we've done, including the sorting and the labels. And here is the link to share the board with members. The user staab is exactly the same as other task boards. You can make an assignee to become a member so they can contribute and have visibility on the board. You can add members as you wish, add labels, update the label names, or hide the label. The activity stream tab is pretty standard as it shows you all the activities you've done on the tasks, and that includes the changes happening behind the scene in the record and not necessarily the changes from the task board. And the configuration tab offers the same capability as guided boards and free phone boards, including the option to see additional card information. And apparently the advanced settings allows you to update the theme, such as changing the background color or hiding or showing a lane. Let's close the settings. The next thing I would like to show you is padding a card. Since this is a flexible board on incident table, adding a card means creating a new incident. Let's update some of the mandatory fields. Now the important thing is this incident should meet the filter conditions that we defined for our flexible board. And that means this should be an active incident with a priority of one or two. So in order for this incident to appear on our task board, we'll need to update the impact and urgency of this incident to indicate a priority two or a priority one. Now, upon submission, you'll see a new card is added here. Let me assign this card to myself. Apparently, adding a card from a different lane will automatically list that card under that lane. Let's try it. As you can see, the second incident I created under the doing lane is now listed here with priority one. Now, let's test something. I would like to go to the list of all incidents. Find an incident that is in a lower priority upgrade the priority to be a P one or P two, copy the number for a reference, leave a workne and update the record. Now, if I go back to my Visual task board, Search for the number. I can see this incident is newly added to my lane. If I don't have any sorting applied, new tasks usually go to the end of the list. In this case, I can manually reorder cards and move it to the top of the list. This was all I wanted to cover about flexible boards. Now, if I go back to the list of all boards that I own, I can see the board types in different colors. And that's a good way to distinguish between the different board types. This will allow me to easily jump into my other boards, whether it is a free phone board or a data driven guided board. And that's a complete look at flexible boards. In the next video, we'll try to compare these different board types, the capabilities, and the limitations and understand which board should be used for different scenarios. I hope you enjoyed it so far. See you back soon. 8. Comparing ServiceNow Visual Task Boards (VTBs): Over the past sessions, we've explored how to navigate, create, customize and manage tasks using the powerful visual taskbds in service now. Now to bring it all together, we're going to compare the different VTB types, freeform, guided and flexible, and discuss when and where to use each with some real world examples. This will help you choose the perfect board for your specific needs. Let's break down the key differences to make that decision easier. First, think about the primary purpose of your board. If you need something for your own personal tasks or a quick team project that requires a lot of flexibility, free phone boards are perfect. They're great for brainstorming or when you have a unique work flow. But if you need to see your work based on fixed values, like the status of an incident, a guided board is your best bet. It's ideal for standard processes like those in ITO and what if you want to see a specific set of records, but organize them in a custom way? That's where flexible boards shine. They let you visualize filtered records while keeping the original data intact. Next, consider the task stores. Meaning, where do the tasks on your board come from? With free phone boards, you're often creating private tasks manually, but you can also pull in existing records from anywhere in service now. Guided and flexible boards are more automated. They're both dynamically populated from a table. The difference is that guided boards pull in records based on the filters and the fields you use for the lanes, while flexible boards pull them in based on only the filters you set up. Now, what about the lanes? How are they defined? On a free phone board, you have complete control. You create and name the lanes yourself. The same is true for a flexible board. On a guided board, however, the lanes are automatically created based on the different values in a field you choose, like the priority of an incident. A really important difference is what happens when you move a card. On free form and flexible boards, moving a card is just for visual organization. It does not change the underlying data. This is where guided boards are powerful. When you move a card from one lane to another, like from N to in progress, you can actually update the field on the real record in service now. Finally, let's touch on archiving. Free foam boards are the only type that supports the archiving of both cards and lanes. With guided and flexible boards, you don't really archive cards in the same way. On a guided board, you might hide certain lanes and on a flexible board, the visibility of records is all based on the filters you've set. Let's illustrate with some real world scenarios. First up, let's consider an IT support specialist. We'll call her Melissa, who's trying to organize her daily work. For her, a free form board would be a great choice. She can create lanes like my to do today, waiting for user and escalated. She'll add her private tasks and also drag in specific incidents or requests assigned to her from service now for a consolidated personal view. Moving an incident to waiting for user on her board is just for her visual tracking. It doesn't change the incident record itself unless she opens it to do so. Next, picture a major incident management team that needs to see all critical incidents at a glance. They would likely turn to a guided board. They can set it up for the incident table with vertical lanes based on the state field and swim lanes based on major incident state. This gives them an instant, accurate view of all critical incidents and their current status directly from the system. Moving an incident card from the in progress lane to the resolved lane would update the actual incident records state. Now, what about a software development team that needs to track the life cycle of high priority bugs? In this case, a flexible board is the perfect option. They can filter for defect type tasks that are active and have a critical or high priority. Then they create custom lanes like bug triage, development, testing, and ready for release. Moving a bug card through these lanes on the flexible board helps them track its progress in their specific workflow without necessarily changing the bugs official state field in service now until key milestones are hit. This is especially useful if the internal process has more granular steps than the standard states allow. And for our last example, imagine you're on an HR delivery team that works in an agile environment. You have a backlog of user stories that enables and enhances different features and functionality for the employees. As part of your sprint planning, you've included stories to work on the survey management for new hits, some portal capabilities, and employees profile data. And you would like to track the progress of these stories in the current sprint. The service now Agile Board helps you through this journey by embedding a data driven visual task board for your sprint tracking. On this guided board, you can monitor how your team is delivering the stories and contribute to the success of this sprint and the overall project. As you can see, the choice of board really depends on what you want to achieve. Do you need ultimate flexibility for personal or unique tasks? Free form is your friend. Do you need a board that is strictly reflex and potentially updates your existing record data based on feels like state? Guided boards are the way to go. Or do you need to see a filtered set of live service now records, but organize them visually in costal lanes without immediately changing the underlying data? Then flexible boards offer that pulpit blend. 9. Class Conclusion: Welcome to the final video in our course. Getting started with ServiceNow Visual Taskforce. Let's quickly recap the TV times we've learned about free phone boards. These are your go to for ultimate flexibility. You can quickly create them to organize personal tasks or team projects where you want complete control over laying names and the content within them. While they initially create private tasks, we've also seen how you can bring in various existing service now task types like incidents or change requests, data driven boards. These boards connect directly to your service now data. Guided boards, as the name suggests, these are more structured. The vertical and horizontal lanes are directly mapped to specific field values from your service now tables like an incident state or priority. This provides a clear data back view of your work based on existing record attributes. Flexible boards. These also pull in tasks or records directly from your service now instance based on filters you define. But the magic here is the layout control. You can customize your lens exactly how you want without changing the actual record data in the background. Throughout this course, you've gained the skills to harness the power of visual taskbards. We've covered everything from creating your first board to managing tasks, customizing views, and collaborating with your team. The real power comes from applying this knowledge to your specific workflows. Don't be afraid to experiment. Create different types of boards for different purposes. See what works best for you and your team. Visual taskbards are designed to make your work more transparent, organized and efficient. Thank you for joining me in this course on service now Visual Taskboards. I hope you feel empowered to go out and transform the way you manage your tasks and projects. Happy days. See you soon.