Welcome to part three of our series highlighting the enhancements to Change Management in Geneva. You can catch up on the rest of the series with these links:
Part 1 - Geneva: Change Management — Making Change a Little Less Painful
Part 2 - Geneva: Take Control Of Your Low Risk Changes With the Standard Change Catalog
Today, we are going to look at how to seamlessly avoid change conflicts with our upgraded conflict detection capabilities. Conflict detection has been a part of ServiceNow's Change Management capabilities for quite some time (Fall of 2010 for those keeping score at home).
Geneva takes those capabilities and brings them front and center along with removing the need to manually kicking off the process.
In order to kick off the conflict detection capabilities, you have to populate the change with a CI (or CIs) and the planned start and end dates. If you haven't done so, you'll see this dialogue reminding of that in the "Conflicts" tab.
Once you've populated those fields you can manually kick off the process by clicking on the "Check Conflicts" button in the "Conflicts" tab or if you prefer you can kick off the process automatically by setting the property to do so (we'll review when we talk about the new properties).
One of the other changes we made in Geneva was to make it much clearer if and when conflict detection had been run. You can now clearly see in the form the current status of conflict detection, when it was run, and if there were conflicts:
You get a lot more information about the nature of the conflicts within the "Conflicts" tab:
The "Conflicts" tab will show you information such as affected CIs, type of conflict, schedule, conflicting changes, and time and date details regarding when the conflict detection was last run, at a glance.
We've also introduced a host of properties for controlling what conflict detection will pick up and when it will run -- including the aforementioned ability to automatically run whenever you make an update to the form:
All of this information being upfront, and automatic, allows you to quickly and easily schedule your changes while preventing unnecessary rework.
