Welcome to the fifth, and final, entry in our series introducing the enhancements to Change Management in Geneva. If you happened to miss the previous posts here is a quick review:
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
Part 3 - Geneva: Seamlessly Avoid Change Conflicts
Part 4 - Geneva: Three "c"hanges with a Big Impact on Change Management
In this entry we're going to explore the new state model and the transitions that are possible between states. This new model represents a much prescriptive approach to Change Management in ServiceNow and one that's based on good practice from ITIL, lessons learned from implementations, and our own experience running Change Management processes in other companies. Our goal with this more prescriptive model was to make it so that you can stand your Change Management process up more quickly and with less customization.
The state model describes what states a change will pass on its road to completion. Change is fairly regimented process therefore we can describe what we want the state progression to be, and where it's possible to progress from a given state.
First, let's review the states and what they represent:
New - This Change request is in the process of being drafted. It's expected in the new phase that you're saving frequently, adding details, and generally prepping the change.
Assess — This is where the change will go through peer review and technical approval.
Authorize — This is where the CAB and Change Manager approve and schedule the Change.
Scheduled - The change is fully scheduled and authorized. It is now waiting for the planned start date.
Implement — Time to make the change! The planned start date has approached and the actual work to implement the change is being conducted.
Review - The work has been completed. The change requester now determines whether the change was successful and if post-implementation review is necessary.
Closed - The review work has been completed and the change is done.
Canceled - A change can cancelled from any of the other states if it's no longer required with exception of closed.*
You can see them represented in the process flow across the top of the Change:
It's generally a linear progression through the states but the different change types progress through the states in different ways:
- Normal changes pass through all the states
- Standard changes skip the Assess and Authorize states and proceed directly to being scheduled.
- Emergency Changes skip the Asses phase and proceed directly to Authorize for CAB approval
If you want to modify the states and their transitions you can read about how to do on the new docs site**:
Thank you to jenn.ostrom, cameronrichard, and the whole UK team for the hard work they did to make everything I've covered in this series possible.
* Yes - there's a little judgment if you're trying to cancel a closed change. Why would you do that??
** I still type Wiki nine times out of ten — this is going to take while.
