What is the best approach for moving Smart Assessment Templates between environments?

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AlexR2
Tera Expert

‎11-18-2025 10:00 AM

As we are starting our journey to convert classic attestations to new attestations using the Smart Assessment engine we found ourselves at a decision point on how we migrate the templates between the environments.

 

Background: we cannot build the templates directly in production for the following reasons:

  • Only admins have the scope switcher and the control category templates need to be built in the GRC: Policy and Compliance Scope, similar to the OOTB "GRC attestation"

AlexR2_0-1763488397568.png

 

  • There is currently no preview capability to work out all the bugs and once you publish the template there is no going back to editing this template once you kick off some attestations. OOTB ACL is set to "nobody" for deleting any attestations records.

We came up with two approaches and both have pros and cons.

  1. Publish customization to our app repo
    • Pro: easy to grab the entire set of application files
    • Con: will also grab all in progress changes and move to upper environments prematurely
  2. Update Sets
    • Pro: moves only the files related to the template
    • Con: need to identify all the classes that need to be captured

What is everyone else doing?

 

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Connor Levien
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎11-19-2025 03:37 AM

@AlexR2 Smart assessment templates are intended to be moved via update sets like other configuration in ServiceNow. For example if you are making a new GRC attestation, you should use the GRC: Policy and Compliance Management application scope, create a new update set. You shouldn't modify the OOTB templates but you can create a copy and all the attributes of the template will be auto added to the update set. Just make sure you stay in the same app scope during the set up (e.g dont build part of the smart assessment in one scope and part of it in another it can be done but just means more update sets are needed). 

 

If you want to see in more detail you can open the smart assessment template in the classic ui and add the versions related list to see all the updates added to the update sets

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Connor Levien
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee
In response to AlexR2

‎11-20-2025 03:59 AM

@AlexR2 good catch! I will raise this to the product team to check they are aware.

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Vinod54
Tera Expert

3 weeks ago

Hello @AlexR2 ,


Update set is preferred way to move but there is a catch when you are moving to incremental updates. 

Because you have the published assessment template to draft to edit it. In order to do that you have to delete existing assessment instances. 

 

There are few best approaches based on the scenario to migrate the updates. 
1. When initial development: Have an update set , capture the update including your publish of the assessment template as well and move to the next instance as published. 

 

2. Increment large updates to the Assessment template: Unpublish the assessment template, make changes, publish the template and move it. 

 

3.  Independent minor changes:

  • Automate response of a question within a published template. These can be changed without published and moved to the next instance. 
  • I have changed the order of the choices to a question. 
  • Removal of choices
  • Removal of conditions 

These will not affect any other parameters of the assessment, these can be also moved setting the template back to draft. Anyhow you have to use the update set to capture and move them. 

 

Thanks, 

Vinod Kumar M

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