How do I skip "Scheduled" in a change management workflow?

ServiceNowSteve · ‎07-10-2018

Hello all,

I am building out our Change Management piece of ServiceNow and one of the requirements was to skip the "Scheduled" phase and go straight into Implement after approval. If I change the workflow to set the state to implement instead of Scheduled it just doesn't do it and in fact it will freeze up the whole process because it's expecting to first goto Scheduled before it proceeds. We are OOB for the most part, any idea how I can accomplish this?

nyancer3 · ‎07-10-2018

Change request flows are now built on a set of script includes. The script includes come in pairs; one includes "SNC" in the name and is read-only. The other has the same name, but without "SNC" and is available for you to customize. That is the best-practice method for customizing change management for instances running the Change Management - State Model plugin.

Take a look at the script include "ChangeRequestStateModel_normal" to see the structure of the state models used by the Change Management application to control state flow. There are also script includes for Standard and Emergency changes.

You can see that there is a property in the script include for each state value. This property is an object with several of its own properties. The one you need for your question is the "next_state" array. Find the "authorize" property and change the next_state array from "scheduled" to "implement" in order to make that the next state. You will also want to update the workflow activity that sets the state to Scheduled and make it Implement (looks like you already did that).

However, I would caution that this will also populate the actual start date on the change request immediately after approval. You need to be sure this is what you want to do.

Hope that helps.

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TiffanyL · ‎07-10-2018

Agreed this is not best practice. This is a temporary workflow that will enable us to quantify the high volume of changes that are not following CAB or properly obtain approval prior to turning knobs. Our change manager is going to use this as a means to obtain data on what assignment groups are bypassing CAB.

nyancer3 · ‎07-10-2018

Interesting. I've seen similar things at other companies. Wonder if you've thought about using tags or something? Implementing a new change type is a pretty heavy endeavor 🙂

TiffanyL · ‎07-10-2018

So far, I have everything working with the exception of the visible "request approval" button.

I cannot get the UI action to hide where the change type is "unauthorized"

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=ffd62ed8dbdb9f00fff8a345ca9619b0

That is the reason I began looking into the script include (your explanation above was helpful).

nyancer3 · ‎07-10-2018

I'll post an answer to that question. Glad this was helpful.

ServiceNowSteve · ‎07-10-2018

I did set it

authorize: {
nextState: [ "implement" ],

//Original
//nextState: [ "scheduled" ],

but it still went to scheduled. I am ok with the actual start date part.