CAB Workbench Issues

[manceltic]

We have been using the CAB Workbench to facilitate our weekly CAB meeting and while it offers some value we have quite a few issues with it so far:

(1). Slow Performance. If I go through all the change requests at a normal pace in the meeting, the system sometimes get's delayed when I approve a change. When this occurs you get a message and the change actually does not get approved and additionally the meeting notes will show this change with "no decision." We have been working with the vendor on this. They reduce the time delay on the back-end approval call which did not fix the issue. Next the Vendor is taking a 5 minute outage to do some maintenance on our instance. I will know next week if this helped or not

(2). If during the meeting, you have to skip a change request and come back to it, the process is very clunky. 

• When you click “Next” on the active record it will ask you if you want to go to the next record. If you click cancel it won’t otherwise it does and in the notes it shows the CR with “No Decision.”
• You can manually click to the next record itself and it does show the field details, however, the record isn’t active meaning it won’t let you approve it or click on the next button either.
• I also tried changing the view from pending agenda items to all agenda items. Here it shows all CR’s including the skipped ones, however, you can’t do anything with them meaning again the skipped records can’t be activated.  From what I can tell you really have to go through each record in order one by one. You can pause to stop the timer, click next to skip, click approve or reject. Then unless you skipped the record, you have to click next to activate the next record in sequence.
• The meeting log will then always show “no decision”, approved or rejected for each CR.

• Kind of strange behavior so in situations like today where we have a change or 2 that we have to come back too we will have to click next to activate the next record so we can keep the meeting going. Then we can switch to all agenda items and display the CR’s we skipped so we can discuss them once the change owner is on the call. However, either way we will need to manually approve those CR’s so if you do it in the workbench you can click on the little update icon on right to open the record then approve it, or like I did today can open the CR in another session outside of the workbench to review/approve the CR as needed.

(3). We have a field on our change form called affected locations which is auto-populated from our CMDB. We have this field as part of our display for the CAB Workbench. What's occurring is that the values in that field don't display corrected in the meeting. We have narrowed it down to locations where we have the city and country. Sometimes the workbench shows the values truncated, sometimes blank. We have opened a ticket with the vendor to fix this hopefully.

(4). We wanted to use the workbench to send out meeting invites instead of using outlook as we do now but ran into an issue. So the workbench by default will send invitations (if the CAB Manager directs the system to do so) based on the CAB meeting definitions. So the CAB Manager, Delegates, Board Members, Board Groups and then the assigned to names of each individual change that is pulled into the agenda for that specific meeting. Most of this seems to work fine for us; however, the Board Groups field does not and in fact it seems like it's ignored completely. We have tried a number of setups here including servicenow group with members and no email list, group without members but email list and group with both. In all cases the invites never went to anyone of the members or DL. We even ensured that the associated DL was setup for external usage as well but still no luck.  Problem here for me is that I don't want to have to maintain both an outlook DL as well as a group in ServiceNow. I want to use this field as my "permanent CAB members" that I would expect to come to every meeting regardless of content. 

If anyone has any information or other suggestions on any of these please respond.

Thanks very much.

Scott.

[Shelby2]

Hi Scott,

I have come across multiple organizations that also struggle with the "user friendliness" of CAB workbench.

Right now I am currently working on building out an alternate widget to CAB workbench in my free time but while I am creating that, I would suggest using a workaround.

There are a few companies that I have seen ditch the CAB workbench altogether and create their own filtered module to access the appropriate filter on the change request table. 

While this solution may not be ideal, it does seem to be effective. If you would like me to go into detail on this I can.

Another solution I have seen is the CAB manager has a report being filtered to them of Changes that require approval, and when it comes time for the CAB meeting, they have a list of changes that they can either click on to open or search the Change Number in the search bar in the top right which will instantly open it.

Both of these companies typically approve from within the change record itself.

Please let me know if you have any more questions and please mark HELPFUL or CORRECT if I have provided useful information.

Thanks,

Shelby

[manceltic]

Thanks Shelby appreciate the reply back.

Agree other ways to manage the meeting which we have also done before as it's easy to setup an agenda etc including filtering the changes you expect to review in the meeting.

We decided to use the CAB Workbench because it automates some of this and makes it easier for one person to manage the meeting as you can easily approve the CR's directly from the workbench. Also liked the automatic meeting notes feature as well.

Hoping ServiceNow can fix the issues I mentioned so that the tool becomes much more useful and functions as intended.

Scott.

[Rachael7]

Hi Shelby!

I am attempting to import changes from another system into ServiceNow, and the CAB workbench is failing miserably, lagging, not showing Approve/Reject buttons, etc for the 250 changes I'm trying to import and then run through to get us to a good cutover date between systems.

Have you finished your custom widget for the workbench? 

If not, can you please elaborate on the filtered module that other companies use?

Thank you so much.