Change Success Score

It is hard to believe but the initial ITIL best practice guidance for Incident, Problem and Change Management was introduced to the market almost 20 years ago. There was a time when Change Management was considered the only safeguard for organizations when it came to managing unplanned service disruptions related to change but times have changed. Dev teams have done an amazing job of retooling and adopting modern practices such as DevOps, CI/CD, Agile, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) over recent years. In parallel, Change teams are modernizing to serve a more mature dev community without compromising the stability and governance mandates of their respective organizations. Stacking features from ServiceNow like Change Success Score, Change Approval Policies, Risk Intelligence and Multimodal Change creates a fun environment where every change lifecycle is matched with absolute precision and artificial change barriers are eliminated.

Change Success Score is a numerical expression that represents a group’s change success history. It can be used to evaluate the likelihood of future success and help determine the right level of change rigor. We effectively introduced gamification into our change management application stack. This capability can help identify automation, improvement, and coaching opportunities. Change Success Score is a "gamification" play that brings some competitive fun to the change landscape while serving as an incredibly powerful evaluation tool for change automation.

Once the Change Success Score plugin is installed and the initial data collection job has finished, a new field level decorator icon will be rendered next to the Assignment group field on the Change Request form. Selecting it will display the Change Success Scorecard (shown below) of the team responsible for that change.

It is important to note that every team starts off with an initial score of 500 so if all teams show a score of 500, there is likely an issue with one of the data collection jobs or the initial collection job has not been run. Each team will have both a numerical value and a visual indicator specifying whether their score is categorized as Very High / Excellent (700+), High (600-699), Medium (500-599), or Low (Less than 500). Think of this as a credit or karma score. Every successful change by the team increments the score while every failed change will decrement the score. The formula indicators used to calculate Change Success Score can be modified by customers but the default OOB multipliers are shown below.

Change Success Score also includes a leader board to compare and contrast team scores that span your change ecosystem. It can be accessed by selecting the [View Change History Details] button in the card view and then clearing the assignment group. The ability to compare and contrast team scores can be incredibly powerful when it comes to coaching and having meaningful change velocity conversations with your dev teams. Now those necessary change automation conversations can be both objective and data driven. For example, change process owners may allow for the auto approval of low risk changes when a certain change success criteria is achieved. Friendly competition among teams is fun but the real power of Change Success Score is unleashed when those scores are leveraged in Change Approval Policies.

One of the things customers love about Change Success Score (CSS) is that it has so many different leverage points. With Change Success Score, change approvers can see how “Good” or “Not so Good” a specific team is when it comes to delivering successful change. Here are some very simple yet powerful use cases;

• Approvers can consider CSS when reviewing / approving a request
• Change Success Score can trigger additional approvals
• Change Success Score can trigger auto approvals
• Leaderboard can be used for coaching and rewarding teams that maintain high quality standards
• Teams are able to increase velocity by maintaining high change success ratings

Data Collection

This feature is intended for all ITSM Pro customers wanting the ability to build automation policies around change processing that are based on a team's quality metrics. The first step is to simply load the Change Success Score plugin. Upon activation of the Change Management – Change Success Score plugin [com.snc.change_management.change_success_score], note that a batch of PA jobs will be added including one for the initial data collection [Change success score metrics (Historical data)] which must be run manually. There is also a daily job [Change success score metrics (Daily)] that runs automatically at 02:00 UTC and the run time can be modified by customers as needed.

Initial Data Collection Job

1. Navigate to Performance Analytics > Data Collector > Jobs
2. Search for jobs with change success in the name (e.g., *Change Success).
3. Click to open the [Change success score metrics (Historical data)] record.
4. Click the Execute Now button to begin the data capture.
5. Click the back arrow to return to the list of jobs.

Overview - Daily Data Collection Job

Creating a Flow Action for Approval Policies (Flow)

Create a Change Success Scoreflow actionNavigate to Process Automation > Flow Designer.Select Action from the New menu on the right hand side of the screen.

Populate the form as follows and submit: