Digital Product Release using ServiceNow as the planning tool

ChrisBew · ‎11-27-2024

Hello community!

Background:

I am part of a newly-formed team who will be responsible for maintaining and enhancing a large ServiceNow environment. As part of this, we need tools to help us manage our demands and workloads. We have access to ITSM Pro and PPM subscriptions, so naturally we would gravitate towards the tools on the platform that we are most familiar with.

The challenge:

We will be using Agile 2.0 to manage our backlog and our sprints. I will be acting as our 'Release Manager' so after reading about the impending retirement of Release Management 2.0, I was very excited to get my hands on DPR.

After playing about with it for a bit, I like what I see, but was dismayed to discover that as per the documentation:

Add a product enhancement from an epic

Adding stories, epics, and features to a version/release is only supported via integration with external tools!

This is very disappointing as it effectively prevents us from automatically tracking what we have delivered with each release - which would have been a key benefit of Release Management 2.0!

I find it very disappointing that ServiceNow seem to be pushing us away from using their own tools, when we want to be in a position to adopt and promote them! I have heard rumours within my own org that the higher ups would like the opportunity to retire JIRA in favour of bringing everything together under 'one service management roof' but that doesn't seem to be the direction we are travelling.

So, I guess what I'm asking here is:

1) Is there anyone else here who has run into a similar challenge, what are your thoughts, and how have you tackled it?

2) If possible, I'd love to hear what the DPR product team has to say about this. Is there any desire or future plan to enable better integration between DPR and ServiceNow's own planning tools from SPM? The optimist inside me hopes that there is a new version of Agile 2.0 in the works and that's why the DPR team hasn't decided to integrate with the old one...

Colin OBrien · ‎12-10-2024

Hi Everyone,

Today, we use the DevOps Data Model and the DevOps Integrations to unify how DPR works with any planning tool so that some teams can use Agile 2.0 and others can use a different tool (like Jira or ADO) while keeping everything consistent. That being said, we do have some enhancements planned for the Feb release to streamline how we work with SPM in general. This is something that we are working with the SPM team on as parts of the planned vision require updates to the Strategic Planning Workspace which also is planned to be delivered in February.

Quick disclaimer: since the Feb release is not finished or available things are subject to change.

In the February release, you can opt in to planning your release in Agile 2.0 (through the Scrum Release record) and having any Epic or Story planned into that release automatically connected in DPR. We will create the version record and attach the generated DevOps Work Item records so that you can see within the Release's scope.

Also, you will be able to do release planning in SPW with the inclusion of a new Lens that will include Product Enhancements.

We will have more information on these features soon as we wrap up development and will post some videos on how it works.

Thanks for the continued feedback. We don't think that we will be finished with how we connect SPM and DPR with the Feb release, so please keep letting us know how we can better support your use cases.

Cheers,

Colin

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Mara6 · ‎12-06-2024

Hi @ChrisBew we are starting our journey here using DPR and I also got desapointnned because doesn't integrate with SPM, have you got to solve this?

ChrisBew · ‎12-09-2024

For now, we will just have to manually manage our release scopes by listing the work items on a spreadsheet attached to the release as we really don't want to go down the path of customising this app.

I'm really hoping that the product team sees this post and can comment on their future plans for DPR, so we can make a decision on whether or not it's worth continuing to use it.

ChrisBew · ‎12-09-2024

For now, we will just be manually managing our release scopes, and attaching the list of work items to the releases which will enable us to keep a record of what each release contained.

We really don't want to go down the route of customising the app.

I'm hoping that the product team see this post and can comment on the future direction of DPR in terms of its integration capabilities, so we can make a call on whether it's worth continuing to use it.

Mara6 · ‎12-10-2024

Thanks for the input, I have tried to related the story using the work item anda finding itbm record but no luck, hope dev team help us asap