Building a dynamic Routine Change Template

[Sonal10]

I want to propose the following to make the Routine/Standard Change templates more valuable & user friendly.

I am actually seeking assistance from all you great ServiceNow experts - to comment on if this sounds good, if it's achievable and if it's worth make it available OOB in one of the future releases.

So, the idea is to build the Routine/Standard change template using an existing change, which can be editable.

The requester should be able to list out user-defined variable information and use them in standardizing the text within the template. This will indeed make the change record look very "Standard".

On a create new Standard Change template form, we should provide some functionality to add variables for the standard change proposed.

All we need, next, is some functionality as shown below to provide uall the experts sers with these defined variables, so that these ca be dragged and dropped on the form fields where applicable. Example: Short Description: "AD: Promote DC - <DC Name> in <Office Name>".

You can imagine the functionality to be similar to building an Email notification.

I am not a programmer - but I believe this should be achievable by using dynamic/temporary tables. I am sure there are experts out there who may have better ideas.

I am happy to start a discussion and get some inputs/ideas to improve the usability of this module.

I am a die hard fan of mark.stanger and look forward to comments/ solutions/suggestion from him. And of course from all you experts out there too

[Mark Stanger]

Thanks Sonal.   I completely agree with the concept of simplifying the creation and usage of standard changes.   ServiceNow has made some strides in this direction as of the Geneva release with the addition of change copying and their standard change setup.   Unfortunately, it's not as flexible as it probably could be in some cases.   While the specific type of setup you're describing here would probably require a decent amount of custom UI work - or at a minimum some new, custom tables, I think most of what you're looking for can be accomplished with a custom change copy routine.   This is what I've done in the past and what Crossfuze has leveraged to great success for a bunch of clients for years before ServiceNow introduced their functionality.   The advantage is that you just use the regular change_request table with regular change tasks and attachments and then copy from there.   You need to lock down a few of the fields to make it work just right, but it works great and ends up being very simple.   Here's the SN Guru article (that I still use) describing that setup if you'd like to try it out.   The new SN change copy routine does something similar (albeit a bit more restricted).   If you'd like to see a full demo of this along with a fully-built, UAT-ready change management solution that I personally designed and built you can contact Crossfuze to set up a demo.

[Sonal10]

Thanks mark.stanger   (and apologies for the delay in replying!).

We are on Geneva & already using the standard change catalog module. I have managed to get a Standard change template Creation form set up for us.. where we pre-populate the form based on an existing change - very close to the functionality you have described on your site.

However I am not very happy to see standard changes with rigid short descriptions and possible variables defined in one place and referred to in the other sections. Because when you look at the change calendar it does not serve the purpose.

For example consider the example described in my post -

As it is now:

The short description will have to be "AD: Promote DC", whether it is for Office A Office B or Office C...

In this case if you raised 3 or more Standard changes - you would not be able to differentiate unless you clicked into them.

On the Change schedule they will just block the dates reading "AD: Promote DC".

Nice to have:

It would be helpful to dynamically pull the office name and somehow show the short descriptions as "AD: Promote DC in Office A" or "AD: Promote DC in Office B" , "AD: Promote DC in Office C"

So they make more sense and add value to the change schedule.

Hope you can see what I mean?

Unfortunately where I am now - we already have a fully established change module working and meeting 90% of our expectations really. I am trying to just improve the usability. What are your views?

[Mark Stanger]

I don't know of any simple way to dynamically pull those values but if you just used changes to copy from as templates couldn't you just set up the template and then allow the user to overwrite the field value during the planning phase for the change?

[Sonal10]

Sure we could but that will need governance - as it could be misused by adding may be just a little more to it.

Moreover it would just go unnoticed as the change will be stamped as approved straightaway.

I am only looking to take this module one level up - just wanted to know your views on

- if it's a good idea?

- if it's achievable (maybe too complex to actually build)

- if it's something that is already being or can be considered to be made available out of the box?

regards,

Sonal