Basic understanding of Change Management

What is Change Management?

Change Management is the process of controlling and managing changes to an organization’s IT infrastructure, application services, and processes in a structured, systematic manner throughout the entire lifecycle of a change request. It involves planning, evaluating, authorizing, scheduling, and implementing changes in a way that minimizes disruptions to the business and ensures the stability and reliability of IT services.

The primary goal of Change Management is to introduce changes into the IT environment in a controlled manner, considering the potential impact on services, systems, processes, and people. It aims to strike a balance between the need for change and the need for stability, ensuring that changes are properly assessed, approved, communicated, and executed.

Refer to more details for Change Management in ITSM here.

Why do organizations need a Change Management process?

The rate of change for most organizations is increasing rapidly, particularly as organizations adopt more agile and DevOps practices, and thus the need for strong governance around changes is ever more apparent. Unplanned changes can lead to problems and, without the traceability or auditability to identify the cause of said problems, SLAs are breached, and business services/outcomes suffer. Therefore, organizations need a tightly managed and controlled approach toward managing changes in IT systems and services. ServiceNow’s Change Management capabilities can help establish standardized and efficient processes for managing changes, reduce the risks associated with changes, improve service quality and availability, minimize undesirable disruptions, and enhance the overall IT service management experience.

Change Management in Service Operations Workspace (SOW)

What is Change Management in SOW?

In Utah, we brought one of ITSM’s most used capabilities, Change Management, into the SOW experience. Users can now manage change end-to-end across the entire change lifecycle within SOW. Meaning, when a change to your infrastructure, application service, business service, or process is required, you can create, evaluate, authorize, schedule, and close changes all within the modern Service Operations Workspace experience.

Check out our product docs and product updates for more information.

How does Change Management in SOW differ from the UI16 Change Management experience?

In UI16, agents needed specific process knowledge to navigate their organizations change lifecycle in the list and form view. The change forms many organizations use can be quite complicated, with numerous fields to cover a variety of change scenarios all within a single form. Change in Service Operations Workspace offers a modern and user-friendly experience that is driven by the underlying state model for the change users are working on. Change form clutter is reduced through dynamic overview page that surfaces only relevant information in the change form based on the persona logging the change and where the change is in its lifecycle. This reduces the need for users to have specific process knowledge and focuses on the “job to be done” as users progress through the process.

Like UI16, change in SOW supports built-in risk assessments, schedule and conflict detection, automated change approval policies, change impact visualizations, and multi-model (fit-for-purpose) change.

Which roles benefit from our latest Change Management experience in SOW?

Knowledge Workers, Approvers, Change Managers and Reviewers/Auditors need a way to quickly view an overview of a change record in SOW that displays different jobs to be done based on the current state. The updated Change management in SOW reduces the need to switch to different views and load additional forms or lists.

What features are available for Change Management in SOW?

As of Utah, you have the following features available in SOW:

• Manage the E2E lifecycle of a change from within SOW​.
• Easily associate CIs and required change tasks for a change request​.
• Calculate Risk using risk intelligence or traditional risk assessments.
• Easily schedule conflict-free changes with the Change Scheduling Calendar

What are the latest release updates for Change Management in SOW?

There have been multiple feature updates with the Utah release for Change Management in SOW. Check out our product updates for details*.*

What are some of the plugins and store applications I can download for Change Management in SOW?

To get started with Change management in SOW you need Service Operations Workspace ITSM Applications application (sn-sow-itsm-cont) installed which, includes user role, plugins, and ServiceNow Store applications. Store applications for change management are:

• Change Management for Service Operations Workspace [sn_sow_chg]

Are there any limitations of using SOW for Change Management?

We have the full change lifecycle management in SOW as of Utah release, but there are a few auxiliary pieces that have yet not been fully incorporated into the SOW experience such as CAB, Mass CI update, and SW Asset Management.

What are the licensing requirements for using Change Management features in SOW?

You can access the baseline E2E change management features with your ITSM Standard license. For advanced features like Risk Intelligence, you would need a ITSM Pro license.

How and where can I create a change request in Service Operations Workspace?

As of Utah Release as a ITIL agent, you can create a change request from Service Operations Workspace’s landing page menu, any change list, from an open incident, interaction, or a problem. You can use a change request form to record information and track modification such as the reason for the change, type, priority, and risk. You can also create a change request in UI16 and can view it in SOW. Check out the detailed procedure here.

What work can I perform on a change request in SOW?

With the ITIL role, users can execute actions needed to manage and move forward a change request (e.g., updating change request status, canceling/deleting a change, creating an outage, creating a change task, refreshing impacted services, view relevant record information, attach relevant records, collaborate using the contextual side panel) from the change record page within SOW. Additionally, if a user prefers or requires use of the classic change experience they can transition to the classic user experience by clicking ‘Continue change request’ within the change record page in SOW.

For more detailed information on actions refer here.