Epic management in ServiceNow

[Hhosking]

All, 

How do you organize the teams and steps of the process for Epic Application? 

• Does each application have an Assignment Group (HIM, Ambulatory, MyChart, Willow etc.)?
• How do you track Lifecycle? 
  • 1. We triage issue/change and ensure proper priority is set
  • 2. If Change - requires clinical approval. How do you document this? Are you using the Approvals functionality? 
  • 3. How do you indicate what step of the change lifecycle the change is in? Do you use stages/states? 
• Where and how do you document anticipated level of effort? 
• For any sites that share an instance of their Epic with another organization, how are you documenting review and approval of changes from each Org/Service Area? 

Thanks, 

Heather Hosking

Epic Program Director

CommUnityCare Health Centers

heather.hosking@communitycaretx.org

[amyfrye]

Hi Heather, see my responses below. Happy to chat more if needed.

• Does each application have an Assignment Group (HIM, Ambulatory, MyChart, Willow etc.)? Yes, each application in Epic has its own CI and the support group (Assignment Group) that manages it is attached to the CI record. 
• How do you track Lifecycle? 
  • 1. We triage issue/change and ensure proper priority is set - We do the same.
  • 2. If Change - requires clinical approval. How do you document this? We have a Business Owner field on the change form that requires a clinical leader for the area to approve the change request. We also have governance groups for some Epic applications where build is approved even before it goes into the Epic sub-environments. Are you using the Approvals functionality? Yes.
  • 3. How do you indicate what step of the change lifecycle the change is in? We use the out-of-the-box states available in the change lifecycle. Do you use stages/states? We only use states.
• Where and how do you document anticipated level of effort? Our IT organization uses SAFe/Agile to plan build work and based on the points assigned to the SAFe Story determines level of effort.
• For any sites that share an instance of their Epic with another organization, how are you documenting review and approval of changes from each Org/Service Area? It is either documented in the change record using the business owner field or the approval is manually captured in the Demand/SAFe record when a governance group exists.

[Ralph Hand]

1.  Does each application have an assignment Group
   1. We have defined business functions such as Pharmacy, Laboratory, Billing
   2. Each of those align with a business facing service in ServiceNow
   3. Each of those services oversee all of the information technology used to support the business function (sort of) aka pharmacy
   4. There can be multiple support groups that support each service, We try to not make the groups specific to a particular application or module but depending on volume that could happen.
2. Lifecycle is interesting, requests for break fix, enhancements, new functionality come is as incidents and requests in service now.   If they are not urgent they are moved to Jira as part of the CSI register for Epic.   Work for future releases etc is managed outside servicenow including prioritization and tracking work.   Work related to break fix get bundled into weekly changes (assuming it's not an emergency change) and run through the change enablement practice in service now.   
3. Services are responsible for working with their business areas to get approvals, testing when they are needed as part of the change enablement flow.   we don't use servicenow to engage the clinicians for approvals.
4. Our change model has a number of stages.  It doesn't seem to be allowing me to attach our change placemat.
5. We have over 100 facilities but it's all one organization.

[Renuka8]

@Ralph Hand 

Could you please share some examples on below how these groups can be defined?

Does each application have an assignment Group

1. We have defined business functions such as Pharmacy, Laboratory, Billing
2. Each of those align with a business facing service in ServiceNow
3. Each of those services oversee all of the information technology used to support the business function (sort of) aka pharmacy
4. There can be multiple support groups that support each service, We try to not make the groups specific to a particular application or module but depending on volume that could happen.

[Ralph Hand]

I have attached our service catalog.   These are all the defined functional areas of the company, all applications are assigned to one of these areas.  In the case of epic each module is assigned to the appropriate area.  Service Offerings show the assignment groups that support those areas, each group supports a specific capability and are not necessarily module or service specific.     Service Offering names in the tool should reflect that activity being done we had bad advice while we were implementing and used the actual group names.

In the first row you can see addiction and mental health.  Any addiction and mental health app in epic would be supported by these groups in support of the addiction business function.

Rules include groups and services cannot be named after an application. 

Approver groups associated with the service are in the final column.  Approvals are fired based on the CI chosen and their relationships in the CMDB.   Some are only notifications based on their level of impact.  

Does this answer the question?  let me know.