ServiceNow upgrades provide a great opportunity to take advantage of new innovation. But you can fall into the trap of falling behind on upgrades because they’re perceived as too time-consuming, and not factored in appropriately to your ServiceNow roadmap. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to simplify the upgrade process, to ensure you’re delivering new functionality and value.
1. Use good project management practices
Treat your ServiceNow upgrade like any other formal IT project. To manage the upgrade, use a project manager, and track and communicate progress with a project management application, like the ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management suite in the ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM) solution. Giving upgrades the right project management resources ensures that your teams bring appropriate discipline and attention to the upgrade process.
2. Follow the documented process
Even if your teams are experienced, don’t let them go into the upgrade process without the right documentation and checklists (after all, even experienced pilots still follow a “takeoff checklist”). To ensure a you don’t miss a step, ensure your teams adhere to the upgrade process on the product documentation page and the release notes for your product upgrade.
3. Review skipped changes
During the ServiceNow upgrade process, configurations and customizations you made to the system will not be automatically overwritten. ServiceNow recognizes that new records won’t create any conflicts, so there is no risk in upgrading them. However, when you modify out-of-the-box records you will need to decide whether to keep the changes you’ve made or accept the records the upgrades process attempted. There’s a way to filter all the changes to focus on what’s important using the Skipped Changes to Review related list on the Upgrade History record.
4. Create and maintain test plans
Any time you upgrade, you need to perform some level of testing. However, you only need to test what you previously deployed. You should create test plans as you make configurations and customizations in ServiceNow, but if you haven’t, you should still create a test plan prior to your upgrade. You can use both ServiceNow’s Test Management application to build and maintain manual test plans, and, better still, ServiceNow’s Automated Test Framework for automated testing. If you haven’t already done so, ensure you have a process in place once your upgrade is complete to create and maintain new test plans as you develop configurations and customizations.
5. Streamline future upgrades
There are several practices you should maintain to ensure your future upgrades go smoothly, including:
- Make sure customization is “business smart,” to reduce the time and cost of future upgrades
- Use our published technical best practices to reduce upgrade issues
- Consider purchasing a configuration review to be audited against practices to reduce upgrade risks
To learn more about this topic, see:
- Our Success Playbook, Perform ServiceNow upgrades quicker and more effectively available on the Customer Success Center.
- Our webinar, where we discuss these practices in more detail
Eric Gerstein, Sr. Research Manager, Best Practices Center of Excellence – Customers Success at ServiceNow
