Change Freeze Scheduling - What are your Best practices around growth and stability?

[dawnkhan]

Interested in comparing notes/benchmarking around the topic of change window be/change freeze practice, to promote stability, primarily around key activities such as enterprise financial close.

Do you implement a change freeze? How many days for month/quarter end? Full Change Freeze or controlled Quiet Period? How did you mature or improve change window and rules.

I have seen is 50-90- 120 day downtime for Enterprise financial close. The answer is not in rightsizing the number of days "frozen" but in finding balance that delivers and promotes stability without inhibiting or restricting growth.

[ian_cox]

Here is an outline of what we do for HI.   I think the answer depends on what type of system you have.   ie retail systems normally have freezes around the big sales events.   Financial and sales systems tend to have freezes around month, year   and quarter end.

Our Change Management implements change freezes or change events to prevent users from making ServiceNow initiated changes to the Cloud Datacenter environment unless explicitly approved in CAB or by XCAB.

Change freezes/events occur at periods of the year during which resources may be limited, or system stability is vital. Examples of when change freezes/events may occur include:

• year end (all Datacenters)
• Thanksgiving holidays (US Datacenters)
• large project rollouts (one or many datacenters)
• patching windows
• maintenance windows

There are other types of change events that limit the types of changes that may be implemented. Examples of other change events are:

• quarter end provisioning periods — changes must not impact provisioning (critical to sales)
• ServiceNow Knowledge events — due to high visibility of our company and brand

[dawnkhan]

Awesome sharing Ian, thank you!!