okay it's it's two minutes after so I think we'll get going thank you everyone for joining uh the webinar today which is all about um how to use change approval policies to accelerate your changes um so let's kick off um if you've been to any servicenow presentations you would have seen our Safe Harbor notice before this is just to make sure that if we talk about any future looking forward-looking statements that you don't base any buying decisions on that I don't think we're going to be doing that today but that's just in case um this is part of an overall series of live on servicenow interactive event sessions so if you scan that code um you will be able to go to our page where the rest of the sessions are shown and you can register for those and and attend any of those that interest you uh they're normally shown on our community page and just some housekeeping so we will save all questions um until the end of the of the session so if you do have a question uh please type it into the Q a button in zoom and we'll monitor those and then we'll go through uh the the answers to those at at the end of the presentation and just to note that this presentation is being recorded and maybe published on our now Community page we will have some polls and we will send out a survey uh after this event to get your feedback okay so thanks again for joining my name is Mike I'm an outbound product manager at servicenow in the itsm business unit mainly looking after a change and devops so the first thing I'd like to do is start with a poll so I'm going to launch the poll but but these are the questions I just want to get an idea in terms of whether people have heard about change approval policies and um uh you know what your awareness is and and the usage so please go ahead and answer that question which you should see coming up on the screen can everyone see the poll okay yes we've got some answers coming through that's great okay we'll give it a few more seconds okay I'm gonna end the poll here all right so just sharing the results so looks like uh most of you or have some awareness of what change approval policies are would like to know more and and some people uh have not used them yet and then one person has is and is using them a lot so that's great thank you for that all right so let's keep on all right just some context here so um for change managers and change teams in in customers around the world um there's a lot of challenges today and that's largely driven by changes in in technology and changes in how we manage technology uh in our organizations so where typically we started life you know a number of years ago with a central I.T Department um managing different functions you know that that's a lot of the practices around managing I.T have grown largely driven by cloud the move to cloud and the move to the move to digital and uh we we see a number of different um technology Stacks out there you know Legacy and uh and digital and devops Etc are driving a lot of change in organizations and organizations really have you know just one or two of these they have a mixture of different technology stacks and different teams running different processes agile Legacy waterfall Etc but they have to manage and when it comes to change that can be a challenge how do we manage all the changes that we need to and ensure we have the right governance over those complex multi-disciplinary areas and at the same time there's a there's a lot of push to increase change velocity and uh and obviously make sure we we maintain our change governance um but we also need to make sure that we can do that in in a manner which adheres to our organization's risk policies and controls so at the center of this is is the change manager who is under increasing pressure to increase change velocity and handle the higher volumes of change um and the Legacy change processes and implementations that we see at customers um often can't handle that so we need to respond to that so how do we do that and ensure our governance it remains in place so we do that by means of um ensuring that we can increase our deployment frequency reduce our change lead times and get faster time to Value whilst minimizing change failures by using various solutions that we have in in the servicenow platform to allow approvals to occur and state state transitions to occur in changes with automation so how do we use conditional Automation and tailoring for the various use cases that we have to meet our change requirements for our organization and the appetite for risk sorry I've lost my okay so within servicenow there's a number of different features in the change management module that have been brought into you know innovations that have come into the platform over time so change approval policies have actually been around since Madrid release so a number of years already multimodal change which is change models uh change success score which looks at how well or not so well your teams are doing at change using machine learning to determine risk automatically we have our suite of devops products that handle the devops side of things and then other other features that we've brought in to help automate the the change journey and provide a more fit for purpose data-driven approach to change um now why are we talking about change approval policies today when they've been around for a while well the simple answer to that and and it's borne out by the poll results is that a lot of customers that I talk to are not yet using them so even though they've been there for a while some customers are not aware or some customers are aware but they'd like to know more and understand what they are and how to use them so that's why we're talking about that today so what are the benefits of change approval policies well essentially they allow you to automate your change approval process so you can automatically approve changes which meet your organization's approval criteria which we'll go through some examples of that you can also automatically reject changes which don't meet the approval criteria or you can dynamically add manual approvers Based on data available on the change or in the platform based on the cmdb Etc so all that allows you to to get the outcomes that are shown there so it allows you to increase your change velocity but still maintain your necessary audit and governance controls obviously increase efficiency uh by reducing the manual overhead on the change manager and the team and also increase efficiency by reducing the overhead on changes signees having to manually Chase approvers they're easy to maintain which I'll show you and they also allow you to quickly respond to ad hoc approval requirements which may come to you from time to pop time to time depending on on on your business you're changing business requirements at your organization so they'll allow you to respond to that very rapidly with without the need for a developer so how do they work um essentially and and the demo will go into this in a bit more detail it will probably be a bit clearer once you see it but there are essentially three elements there are inputs to the approval policy there are decisions and then there are approval definitions so policy inputs are the data that you're going to use to evaluate the decision the approval decision and that data can be any data that's available in servicenow on the platform then we have the decisions themselves which use the decision table which I'll show you and and it uses simple condition Builder as I said there's no code involved and then the approval definitions which are you know Based on data who should approve this change should it be done automatically or manually by a specific person or group so some examples of how they're used if if you have changed success score if you're an itsm Pro customer you would have the ability to use change success score which determines how well or poorly teams are doing that change you can use that score as as an as an input data on a policy to determine for example if teams are doing well a change and they have a good history of success then maybe we can relax the governance requirements around those teams changes and get those changes automatically approved we can also look at approving low risk changes for certain services or teams we can add additional approvals if we need them for for example for a critical Business Service change or some other criteria around a team that might need some help for example um our regulatory requirements will will be satisfied when Auto approving changes because we have uh the audit Trail and we have the policies in place in the platform so they're easily auditable and traceable and as I said before it allows us to be agile and respond quickly to changing conditions around change approvals this overall allows us to accelerate our times of value for the business around change management and overall as I said it allows us to tailor our change approvals to increase our change velocity so now we will jump into the demo Okay so this is an example of a change approval policy in a demo instance that I have here so as I mentioned in the slides change approval policies have inputs you can see some of the inputs here now this particular example is a devops example but it doesn't have to be devops it can be just a normal change that's non-devops in your environment but this is just an example to show you we can pull data from uh any any tool that's integrated with servicenow in in this case so for this example we're pulling in software quality results scanning results from a tool like sonar Cube we're pulling in testing results from our testing tools number of outages in the last seven days would obviously come from the outage table within service now code smells and security hotspots vulnerabilities etc those would come from scanning tools like sonar Cube and with that data we can then make some decision decisions on how we want to use that data so over here we can see there's an execution parameter so we can either say we want the first decision that matches to be invoked and then the policy then the system will exit once it matches the first one or we can say I want to run all the decisions that match so if you have you know 10 or 50 decisions and you want all those to be interrogated then you have the choice for the policy on on running all those now how does it how does it actually work so you can see we've got three decisions here we've got an order field over here which tells the system which order to run these in so you can see devops high risk is the first one if I open that one just show you what that looks like so as I said it uses a condition Builder so there's no code involved it's just taking the data and allowing us to build conditions which makes sense for our environment in terms of what we want to check so in this case the high risk one is going to call a manual approver so I'm sorry take that back that in the high risk one is going to Auto reject the change so it's going to reject the change on behalf of the devops manager which is a virtual user in this case um and that's going to occur under these conditions if these conditions are matched so if we do have if we have had outages more than two in the last seven days and if these results around our testing results software quality results vulnerabilities uh match these values and our CI is this one rewards processing this will match and it will auto reject the change let's have a look at the next one uh oops sorry let's jump back to where I didn't want to go I'll just jump back to note Okay so the next one is when all the policies are met uh it's going to Auto approve the change using this virtual devops manager approver so if these conditions are met we haven't had any outages if our test results are greater than 95 percent uh if it's that CI and the quality software quality results are less than that figure Etc then that will match and the change will be automatically approved and the last one is basically if none of those first two are met this is a default one a catch-all which as you see doesn't have any conditions on it and in this case it's going to assign the approval to a group the assignment group in this case but this could be for example an approval group from a Ci or or a specific group that you that you specify or a user it can be a group or a user so that's essentially how that works so you've got the inputs the decisions and the approvers now let's have a look at how that actually works so the first thing to note is yeah how do these actually get invoked well they they're getting invoked via a flow so this is a flow that will be triggered for those specific types of changes and you can see here um it's going to look up the values for those um it's going to look up the values for for that for the the policy data and it's going to run this subflow to find those values and then it's going to plug it into that flow this is the subflow that's going to get that data it's going to plug it into that flow and then invoke the policies to run so if you're using flow designer already in your environment then that's the way this gets invoked but even if you're using the old service now workflow you can still invoke change approval policies through the workflow so let's look at how it works in practice this is a this is a view of a pipeline a devops pipeline that's that's running but obviously this is just a devops example you could look at a normal change and it would it would show you the similar information so in this case in this in this execution of the pipeline the pipeline ran and the change was created automatically so let's go and have a look at that change to see what happened so here's my change request which was created automatically and you can see down here um the change policy that was applied was all the devops policies were met so that means all those conditions that I showed you before were met and you can see that this change was approved automatically by the devops manager so it met all the conditions and the change was automatically approved if I have a look at this one you can see that in this case something went wrong so let's have a look and find out what happened here okay so you can see this change was Auto rejected in this case because it met the conditions for the auto reject where uh in this case the test the test results were were not adequate so the change was rejected by the system and you can see here the devops manager user rejected the change because the test results were insufficient the conditions were not met to Auto approve it and then in this particular case the third case where the pipeline went through and the change was created automatically okay we can see here that there was a manual review that was done so that the system sent this change for manual approval and you can see here it went in this case to the application development team and this person manually approved the change once they'd had a look at the data and had a good understanding of whether all the conditions for this organization have been met so that in in a nutshell is essentially how change approval policies work now let's just jump back to the slides for a second okay so now that we've gone through um now that we've gone through that uh I just had another poll question uh to ask so I'm going to bring up the poll and you can see the question on the slide on on your screen let me bring up that logs that poll uh whoops oh sorry I think I've already done I think I've launched them both at the start apologies okay so um maybe you can respond respond in the chat if you don't mind sorry that's my fault I've I've not used the polls before um so what I'm trying to get from the audience here is now that you've had a brief look at these um do you think you will uh you will get started with making use of them or do you need any more information or do you not think that these will be of any use to you in your organization happy for you to answer that okay and this white flow answers to come in and you can put your results uh your responses in the in the Q a as well if you want or in the chat okay thank you very much for that all right so um I do have which I will send out to everyone here I do have some additional Resources with additional detail which you can have a look at uh links to our documents the learning portal the community site and some videos Etc uh to give you more information but I'm happy to pause now and see whether we have any questions uh we do we do have some questions uh in the Q a so the first one is do we need to configure a flow for a new change policy or is it an out of the box functionality that's from Pharmacy okay hi Nancy um so so yes you do need to configure the flow to invoke the change policies we do provide out of the box flows and out of the box policies uh to customers but obviously you'd probably want to tailor those to your own organization so yes you do need to configure those but the flow configuration is probably something that just happens once up front and from then on if you need to update your approval decisions Etc the change manager can do that themselves without needing a servicenow admin for that change manager role will be able to update policies so hopefully that answers that one um what do we have in the chat okay any other questions um so so on this one um um the user logged in as M Jennings uh on the second poll voted B looks good but would like to know more uh details so I put everybody as able to on uh to talk so you can unmute yourself and ask your question and exactly what you would like to to know more about yeah please unmute and and happy to have a chat Mr or Ms Mrs Jennings you should be able to talk talk or happy for you to put your question in the chat you're shy um what what information would you like what what um if you want more details what information would you like to see if if you're having trouble unmuting happy for you to type in the chat um so in the mean in the meantime uh we can ask Cheryl Cheryl says good information to discuss with my team uh we looked at it in the past but maybe a good time to bring it up again so Cheryl anything you would need to be able to is Cheryl still here uh she's not here anymore okay so any any other questions from from the team or from the people on on anything else you would like to know more about not very quiet this way today all right well hopefully uh hopefully you found that useful and uh if it if it Spurs some interest and motivation to go and look at at that functionality as I said it's been around for a while in servicenow but a lot of customers don't know about it or are not yet using it and it is a really powerful feature in change management which will help change managers get a better hold of really increasing change velocity and automating the approval process it's really great for that as a former customer I can attest to that I use it a lot so if you do have any questions um or any follow-up required please let us know um otherwise I think we'll end the call there thank you very much for your attendance and feel free to sign up to Future sessions we have a lot of upcoming sessions this year so the calendar is filling up so looking forward to seeing you in our future sessions thank you for being here with us today thanks everyone