Skipped Updates?

[na93]

Hi All,

We recently implemented ServiceNow and are now looking to upgrade to Helsinki Patch 11b, I have done this in our dev environment but unfortunately we have close to ~500 skipped updates. I have resolved most of the high priority ones but 360 of these are priority 5, they look like really small things which i don't think are worth spending the time on.

Should we go through these ones? Are they ok to not review and leave as skipped?

I'm curious to know how others handle skipped updates also as of course this is new to me.

Thanks

[Rajesh Mushke]

Hello Nabeel,

Great information here on the Wiki:

Upgrades Best Practices - ServiceNow Wiki

Good article with some additional information may be found here:

Upgrading ServiceNow? — ServiceNow Elite

From my personal experience...skipped updates are going to be a fact of life once you start down the path of customizing.   If those customizations are not handled in a "Best Practice Fashion", then you will end up modifying "out of box" capabilities, that at upgrade will be skipped.

This will be exacerbated if you don't review the skipped updates each time you upgrade and resolve them, as you'll end up with potentially multiple layers of skipped updates.

The best solution is a rigorous SDLC process for your ServiceNow instance where you document Update Sets, Stories, Sprints, and Releases with notes explaining the reasons why things were changed.   As the platform matures, those updates may be able to be removed so you can take out-of-box behaviors again.  

However, also keep in mind that some updates being skipped are "okay".   If you've customized a form and then that form is later updated by ServiceNow, and the update is skipped, that's fine.   Business Rules, maybe not so much...

In my time as a customer, we only had 1 time over 3 years (and 4 versions of ServiceNow, plus various patches) where I had to go back and revert an update we had made to out-of-box.

My process was to look at the updates, then refer to my Release Notes / Sprints / Stories / Update Sets to understand why the update was made and if it could be reverted (we may have added functionality that the base platform now provided, or we like the base platform functionality better).   I never had an upgrade fail due to these updates...

Refer : Best way to review skipped updates in Upgrade Monitor prior to platform upgrade?

[na93]

Thanks Raj, I have already read these my question is mainly around the low priority skipped updates and if people do review them or not.

Cheers

[Brendan Hallida · Accepted solution]

Hi Nabeel,

Sorry for arriving late to the party.

I asked myself the same question a year ago.   In the end, I sucked it up and reviews all of them.   I had about 470.   The thing I did was save the excel spreadsheet, and then the next time I updated (coming on 5 or so now) I would compare to the existing list and would only have, say, 20 to verify each update.

I really think that you should take the time to review.   You will find that you have updated OOB features.   Even if you had marked the OOB feature (be it BR, forms etc) as inactive and then created a new one, it will still show as skipped, as the OOB feature was set to active, and now it is not.

Cheers,

Brendan

[na93]

Hi Brendan,

That is really helpful, thank you very much.

Wish me luck

Regards,
Nabeel