My 2 Cents on ServiceNow Flow Designer

Hey Fellow Flow Designers (Sorry to use this acronym 🙂,

I would like to share my recent experience with ServiceNow Flow designer and would like to share some thoughtful practices which I used to make my flows a bit optimized and efficient.

1. Don't Reinvent the Wheels

I often saw developers jumping into custom actions and writing code for a simple action which is already available OOTB. Get Catalog Variables is one example. ServiceNow philosophy for flow is low code no code and let’s respect that as much as we can.

2. Its more of a code than a workflow

Its obvious to compare flow designer with old platform workflow and have the same kind of expectation which is not justified. Flow Designer is designed to save time and that would not be accomplished if you busy branching the if, else conditions while repeating the entire logic and actions. The goal is to have minimal required steps for better performance and maintenance. Although, I have experienced some hiccups with Approvals where if you have multiple approvals back to back in a different action, it would revive the past approval record. Looks like Approval Engine need to be disabled manually in order to let the flow run properly.

Bonus: Don't loose patience

I often seen people hitting ‘Activate’ directly before ‘Save’. While most of the time it works, sometime Its lost in the clouds. You may not want to rework on your actions so better have patience then being patient.

So this was my 2+ cents on flow designer, let me know your feedback guys and what would be your pain points so that I can push my creative brain to find some innovative strategies. Keep sharing your love and commitments to the platform to have a strong future proof community.