Change is common in IT, but the effective management of that change will keep organization’s IT operations and services productive. IT change management, when implemented properly, can reduce downtime, cut costs, maximize operational effectiveness, and minimize IT risks. That's where ServiceNow Change Management comes into play.
In this article, let's explore the top features, benefits, best practices, and strategies for a successful ServiceNow change management implementation to help you streamline your change and release management processes.
What is Change Management in ServiceNow?
ServiceNow's change management is an application that monitors and manages IT infrastructure changes, minimizing the impact on business operations and processes. Whether it is a small software patch or a large-scale IT infrastructure revamp, change management enables organizations to better plan, review, approve, implement, and monitor changes and their impact on a centralized ServiceNow platform.
ServiceNow Change Management Features That Ensure Smooth Change Transition
A successful change management reduces downtime, promotes compliance, and enhances communication between devices and teams. Here are a few significant features of ServiceNow Change Management that ensure smoother transitions.
- Multimodal change: Provides IT teams with a way to quickly adjust change request activities to precise use cases.
- Change success rate: Automate approvals for low-risk changes, setting a numeric threshold and assessing the success rate.
- Change approval policy: By leveraging individual change conditions, this feature allows IT teams to effectively manage speed, stability, and compliance.
- Risk intelligence: Provides data-driven predictions using built-in ML algorithms and classification tools.
- Risk assessment and evaluation: Centralizes data access from CMDB and end-user input to calculate the risk of a change request. This allows companies to predict the probable impact of planned changes before executing them.
- Change conflict scheduling: By monitoring changes from a centralized dashboard, IT teams can set up specific time slots and maintenance schedules to avoid possible implementation conflicts.
- Single system of record: It allows teams to view Configuration Items (CIs) and connected services to better understand the impact of changes and implementation plans.
- CAB workbench: Facilitates efficient management of high-risk changes by allowing teams to schedule Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings and set priorities.
6 Best Practices for ServiceNow Change Management
To get the most out of change management, here are the ServiceNow change management best practices that organizations follow for implementing IT changes smoothly.
-
Standardize Your Change Request Process
A consistent process is the key to a successful ServiceNow implementation for change management. Organizations should have a clearly defined approach, starting from the change request, review request, and approval process to change implementation and monitoring impact results. Such organized procedures ensure changes are well-documented, and their implementation is perfectly aligned with business priorities.
-
Prioritize Changes Based on Impact
All changes are not the same or have equal priority. Some may impact the IT operations, and others might impact the entire business objectives. Based on the impact of changes, organizations must categorize and prioritize the changes to be implemented. For instance, critical changes to production systems must be addressed before a low-impact change for internal tools.
-
Automate Change Approval Workflows
Built-in automation capabilities of ServiceNow’s change management speed up approval processes, reducing delays in the change release. After a change request has been initiated, it can automatically be forwarded to the stakeholders involved for approval and initiate the change management implementation process.
-
Plan and Test Changes Prior to Deployment
Prior to change implementation, it is important to understand potential risks associated with it. The Risk assessment helps IT teams seamlessly analyze each change request for possible problems, such as system downtime or incompatible configurations. ServiceNow change management allows teams to set up risk thresholds for every change, i.e., low, medium, or high risk, helping them prioritize high-risk changes and reduce unexpected problems.
-
Monitor and Track Post-Implementation Reviews
IT teams must perform a post-implementation review to analyze whether the change produced the desired impact. Was there anything that went wrong with the deployment? It allows teams to gather feedback, identify bottlenecks, and better fine-tune change management plans to deliver higher-quality changes.
-
Maintain a Change Log for Auditing
Transparency and accountability are the keys to effective change management. ServiceNow change management logs each change in a complete audit trail, keeping records of the requester and approvers along with the implementation date and status. It helps to easily track and audit changes for compliance and enables organizations to recognize trends and improve processes over time.
6 Strategies for a Successful Change Management Process
An efficient change management strategy helps organizations better manage their IT changes in alignment with their business goals without interrupting IT operations and processes. The below strategies help organizations maximize the potential of their ServiceNow change management approaches.
-
Define Goals Aligned to Objectives
The first step for ensuring a successful implementation of change management is to clearly define the project's scope, resource allocation, integrations required, etc. This will help organizations to implement structured procedures that meet their objectives.
-
Automate Approvals and Workflows
ServiceNow enables the highest levels of automation to speed up change management activities. By automating change request workflows, ServiceNow change management increases the efficiency and speed of release plans as we all optimize consistency and quality control by standardizing process.
-
Integration with Other ITIL Processes
ServiceNow Change Management needs to be integrated with other ITIL processes such as Incident, Problem, and Configuration Management. This provides real-time tracking of dependencies and risks associated with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), enabling a transparent view of IT operations and better information-driven decision-making.
-
Categorization of Change Requests
Classification of changes is important for prioritizing requests, understanding their urgency, and routing them to appropriate resources for implementation. Standardization of changes ensures that all the changes follow the same process, thus eliminating errors and improving the quality and consistency of the change delivery.
-
Risk and Impact Assessment
Identifying potential risks early helps organizations develop robust strategies to address issues that have high impact. Also, understanding the impact of a change request is also equally important for making informed decisions about change implementation, detect risks, and mitigate their possible impacts.
-
Performance Monitoring & Improvement
Monitor and measure change performance on a regular basis using the ServiceNow performance reporting feature. The success ratio, lead time, and rescheduled changes are some of the key KPIs that will bring inefficiencies and bottlenecks to attention. Use these KPIs to streamline processes continuously in an ongoing loop for maximizing process efficiencies.
Top 6 Benefits of ServiceNow Change Management
ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) application due to its flexibility, support for automation, and easy integration with other IT software. Here's how its Change Management module is extremely effective:
-
Unified Change Tracking
ServiceNow change management's single, centralized dashboard view allows organizations to track, monitor, and report all changes in real time.
-
Accuracy of Change Evolution
By using the change success score, change implementation managers can effortlessly measure the outcomes of change releases and evaluate the possibility of success.
-
Improved Efficiency and Speed
Automated workflows reduce manual efforts, dynamic change approval processes, and faster change implementation, streamlined change management processes, and minimized service disruptions.
-
Seamless Integration with ITSM
ServiceNow change management integrates with ServiceNow ITSM processes, such as incident management, problem management, and configuration management, enabling optimized communication, collaboration, and productivity.
-
Enhanced Risk Management
Driven by robust, built-in risk assessment tools, the ServiceNow change and release management app helps IT teams detect and reduce the risks associated with change requests. It minimizes service disruptions and ensures uninterrupted workflows.
-
Reporting and Analytics
Powerful reporting features allow IT teams to measure the effectiveness of their change management processes and refine strategies.
Conclusion
Through the best practices of ServiceNow change management, organizations can automate processes, assess risk, and leverage reporting tools to minimize downtime, improve service delivery, and maintain their IT infrastructure robust and agile. A streamlined change request management process through ServiceNow guarantees that each change is managed with great accuracy, resulting in organized IT infrastructure.
Ready to revolutionize your change management processes with ServiceNow? Begin optimizing today with V-Soft, a reliable ServiceNow partner!
FAQs
What are the three types of change in ServiceNow?
ServiceNow change management supports three change types, including standard (low-risk changes), emergency (high-priority changes), and normal (moderate). Based on the priority level, organizations must implement changes using appropriate management processes.
Why do organizations need a change management process?
Organizations need fully controlled approaches toward managing changes to their IT systems and services, especially when adopting DevOps practices. ServiceNow's change management application established a structured procedure for better managing IT changes, reducing their impacts, and improving IT performance.
What are the licensing requirements for using ServiceNow Change Management?
Organizations can access E2E change management features with the ITSM Standard license. However, organizations require an ITSM Pro license for using advanced features of ServiceNow Change Management, like Risk Intelligence.
Why should organizations deploy ServiceNow for change management?
ServiceNow facilitates organizations to streamline and automate the change management process, enhancing control, minimizing operational risks, and promoting compliance without disruptions to services.
How does ServiceNow automate the change management process?
ServiceNow automates change management workflows through enforcing approval procedures, sending notifications, and supporting automatic scheduling, documentation, and monitoring of changes.
Can I customize the change workflows in ServiceNow?
Yes, ServiceNow supports complete change workflow customization with its Flow Designer and other features to suit organizational needs.
What are the roles and permissions usually engaged in Change Management in ServiceNow?
Roles such as Change Manager, Change Approver, Change Implementer, and Change Requestor usually have varying permissions so that appropriate control of change requests as well as approval processes can be maintained.
What is a change request lifecycle in ServiceNow?
The ServiceNow Change Request lifecycle includes phases like creation, evaluation, approval, implementation, and closure, with each phase monitored for auditing and compliance.
