Change Success Score (Gamification)

[gregmorrison]

Change Success Score

It is hard to believe but the initial ITIL best practice guidance for Incident, Problem and Change Management was introduced to the market almost 20 years ago. There was a time when Change Management was considered the only safeguard for organizations when it came to managing unplanned service disruptions related to change but times have changed. Dev teams have done an amazing job of retooling and adopting modern practices such as DevOps, CI/CD, Agile, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) over recent years. In parallel, Change teams are modernizing to serve a more mature dev community without compromising the stability and governance mandates of their respective organizations. Stacking features from ServiceNow like Change Success Score, Change Approval Policies, Risk Intelligence and Multimodal Change creates a fun environment where every change lifecycle is matched with absolute precision and artificial change barriers are eliminated. 

Change Success Score is a numerical expression that represents a group’s change success history. It can be used to evaluate the likelihood of future success and help determine the right level of change rigor. We effectively introduced gamification into our change management application stack. This capability can help identify automation, improvement, and coaching opportunities. Change Success Score is a "gamification" play that brings some competitive fun to the change landscape while serving as an incredibly powerful evaluation tool for change automation.

Once the Change Success Score plugin is installed and the initial data collection job has finished, a new field level decorator icon will be rendered next to the Assignment group field on the Change Request form. Selecting it will display the Change Success Scorecard  (shown below) of the team responsible for that change. 

It is important to note that every team starts off with an initial score of 500 so if all teams show a score of 500, there is likely an issue with one of the data collection jobs or the initial collection job has not been run. Each team will have both a numerical value and a visual indicator specifying whether their score is categorized as Very High / Excellent (700+), High (600-699), Medium (500-599), or Low (Less than 500). Think of this as a credit or karma score. Every successful change by the team increments the score while every failed change will decrement the score. The formula indicators used to calculate Change Success Score can be modified by customers but the default OOB multipliers are shown below.

 

Change Success Score also includes a leader board to compare and contrast team scores that span your change ecosystem. It can be accessed by selecting the [View Change History Details] button in the card view and then clearing the assignment group. The ability to compare and contrast team scores can be incredibly powerful when it comes to coaching and having meaningful change velocity conversations with your dev teams. Now those necessary change automation conversations can be both objective and data driven. For example, change process owners may allow for the auto approval of low risk changes when a certain change success criteria is achieved. Friendly competition among teams is fun but the real power of Change Success Score is unleashed when those scores are leveraged in Change Approval Policies. 

One of the things customers love about Change Success Score (CSS) is that it has so many different leverage points. With Change Success Score, change approvers can see how “Good” or “Not so Good” a specific team is when it comes to delivering successful change. Here are some very simple yet powerful use cases;

• Approvers can consider CSS when reviewing / approving a request
• Change Success Score can trigger additional approvals 
• Change Success Score can trigger auto approvals 
• Leaderboard can be used for coaching and rewarding teams that maintain high quality standards
• Teams are able to increase velocity by maintaining high change success ratings

Data Collection

This feature is intended for all ITSM Pro customers wanting the ability to build automation policies around change processing that are based on a team's quality metrics. The first step is to simply load the Change Success Score plugin. Upon activation of the Change Management – Change Success Score plugin [com.snc.change_management.change_success_score], note that a batch of PA jobs will be added including one for the initial data collection [Change success score metrics (Historical data)] which must be run manually. There is also a daily job [Change success score metrics (Daily)] that runs automatically at 02:00 UTC and the run time can be modified by customers as needed.

Initial Data Collection Job

1. Navigate to Performance Analytics > Data Collector > Jobs
2. Search for jobs with change success in the name (e.g., *Change Success).
3. Click to open the [Change success score metrics (Historical data)] record.
4. Click the Execute Now button to begin the data capture.
5. Click the back arrow to return to the list of jobs.

Overview - Daily Data Collection Job

Creating a Flow Action for Approval Policies (Flow)

Create a Change Success Scoreflow action
Navigate to Process Automation > Flow Designer.
Select Action from the New menu on the right hand side of the screen.
Populate the form as follows and submit:

• Action name: Check Change Success Score
• Category: Change

Click the Create Input button in the Action Input form section.
Populate the Action Input as follows and save:

• Label: Change Request
• Name: change_request
• Type: Reference.Change Request
• Mandatory: true

Note: Click the arrow icon next to Reference to select Reference.Change Request.
Click the + button between Inputs and Outputs in the Action Outline form section.
Select Script.

Script Text Box

The following script is provided as an example for creating the new Check Change Success Score Flow Action. 

Click the Create Variable link from the Output Variables form section
Update the output variable form as follows:

• Label: Change success score
• Name: change_sucess_score
• Type: Integer
• Mandatory: true

The Flow Action that created should look similar to the one below.

Updating Change Approval Policy Action (Flow)

Now modify the flows where you want to evaluate change and add the following steps. The actual flows and flow actions may vary from one organization to another but the flow should look similar to the example below. 

Updating Change Approval Policy Activity (Workflow)

For customers wanting to accomplish this in workflow, there is a sample script below that can be added to the Change Approval Activity in Workflow. That said, customers are encouraged to begin the transition to Flow Designer for change as soon as possible since Flow Designer brings a number of inherent benefits including the consolidation of configuration and runtime information into a single environment so process owners and developers can create, operate and debug flows from a single interface and the ability to access a library of reusable flows.  Below is an example script that can be leveraged for the evaluation of Change Success Score in an approval policy activity. 

 

Conclusion

Change Success Score is a new capability from ServiceNow that helps change teams easily identify automation and improvement opportunities. It is important to note that automation does not translate to a lack of accountability. One of the amazing values that comes natively with change approval policies is the easy identification of the decisions were applied which provides a clear audit trail even on automated approvals. The applied policies can be viewed by simply adding the [Applied Approval Policy] related list. As teams modernize, it will be important to bring your auditors along in the journey as well. Auditors can only help drive automation when they have knowledge of the alternatives and opportunities for improvements.  When we partner to increase velocity and deliver change models that are fit for purpose, everyone wins. 

Over the past few releases, we have introduced dynamic Change Approval Policies allowing teams to easily tailor approvals to individual change conditions. In Paris, Change Success Score delivered numerical expressions of each team's change success history similar to a karma or credit score. In Quebec, we introduced another level of automation with Multimodal Change (Change Models) to deliver “fit-for-purpose” change combined the ability to leverage Machine Learning (ML) to predict change risk using Now Risk Intelligence capabilities. Leveraging the full power of these native ServiceNow Change Management capabilities increases change velocity and removes artificial bottlenecks that are inherent with legacy change management practices. Striking the right balance of velocity, stability and governance has never been easier.