Is a Change Freeze necessary in ServiceNow?

[Erik Richter]

I work for a financial company. We have a Year End Change Freeze.  Looking for other folks opinion if its necessary to have a freeze on ServiceNow applications. Is the freeze an antiquated idea?

If you do institute a freeze that includes ServiceNow apps what is your typical date range?

[emir]

Change Freezes exist where there is lack of trust in the Change Management Process and SDLC Maturity. The risk of a failed change will result in Brand Damage or Loss of Revenue in a high exposure season (like Holiday shopping in the USA).

In theory an org should be able to make change 24x7x365 using an integrated CI/CD pipeline.

[Allen Andreas]

Hello,

Perhaps you may want to elaborate a bit more on what a "year end change freeze" means as you mentioned financial company, but are you still speaking in developer terms for "change freeze".

Anyways, your post is a bit vague, so more information would help us help you.

If this is about development work and pushing updates, etc. then freezes are still a thing and regardless, if it works for you and your company, it's not really about what is "antiquated".

Date range also is dependent on your organization.

There's many variables here where you haven't given us any information to provide more than just people replying with things that may or may not be relevant.

Also, if you're going to rephrase what you've said, please take that time to edit your post and not rely on us reading a comment way down the page. Just throwing that out there to help us out.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Erik Richter]

Thanks everyone for the input. To clarify for those who found this confusing...  A "Year End Change Freeze" is a Change Freeze (of development work deployed to Production) that takes place end of the year (highest traffic holiday and retail spending times). 

Emir really nailed the heart of the issue:  "In theory an org should be able to make change 24x7x365 using an integrated CI/CD pipeline:

As we don't have a full CI/CD pipeline we still rely on a Change Freeze to ensure stability during those high risk end of year times. I was really wondering if other ServiceNow users that also utilize Change Freezes in  their Production environment have exceptions for particular ServiceNow applications (Knowledge, HAM, SAM etc). Thinking that by nature of the platform production change freezes may not be as necessary vs standalone customer facing applications. 

I was also wondering what is the duration (start and end) of other orgs end of year freeze dates. Just curious if they are fairly short (days) or extensive (month). That's a pretty open ended question and OK if no responses to it. 

[emir]

From my previous experience: Change Freeze starts the weekend before Thanksgiving Holiday due to a significant increase in spending that week and the weeks thereafter, and it continues until a weekend in January (such as 8th or 9th).

During this same time period a lot of employees take personal time off, so if a Change fails the right SMEs might not be available to restore service quickly, this is another reason for why it is not lifted after Black Friday.

Do you do business in China? Then maybe another Change freeze during the Lunar New Year week.

Bringing online a new Data Center? Change Freeze. You want your resources available in case those initiatives need them, and not busy with some other apps that failed.

Are you gonna miss your Availability target of 99.9999 for the Quarter, implement the Change Freeze to get your number back up 😄

All of these require the use of the NOW platform in one way or another, and imagine what would happen if someone broke the paging service at this time, so most apply the same freeze to the NOW platform.

The good news is, this should not impact your dev activities due to multiple environments and updatesets. But many customers take this opportunity to run their upgrades in lower environments so they are ready for January Prod release. 

[Ethan Davies · Accepted solution]

Hey @Erik Richter ,

I've worked with a number of customers being on the MSP side and we have had to abide by their Change Freezes regularly. I'll share some of my opinions and insight and hopefully it helps.

Right off the bat, in terms of ServiceNow a Change Freeze is an antiquated idea. There is seldom any risk of the ServiceNow Platform 'going down' or an update that would cause significant disruption to the service during a company change freeze window.

A general compromise on a customer wanting a Change Freeze during a window is to limit the number of significant changes during that window. Allow minor enhancements, defect fixes and the like to proceed but do not perform any major releases or upgrades.

From a customers point of view, there are a couple of factors that are understandable on why they ask for a change freeze:

• Staff are on leave
• Staff are focused on another project and cannot dedicate resource
• Customer is evaluating business capabilities or budgets
• Customer is in a planning phase and does not want to implement anything new until a new direction has been established
• A major ServiceNow upgrade is planned

All of the reasons above don't really impact ServiceNow's ability to perform, but they do impact a customer or organisations ability to react to any potential issue that will arise. "If it can happen, it will" type of mentality.

One good compromise I have found in these scenarios is to implement a "Change Chill" rather than a freeze for ServiceNow. A change chill would allow minor enhancements and basic platform support changes to be implemented and potentially any inflight projects to continue. Due to the velocity of ServiceNow upgrades, patches, hotfixes and security updates no change freeze or chill should last more than a month, anything longer would impact the ServiceNow Patching Program schedules for your instance.

For the question on how long should a freeze last, it is hard to say. It can be driven by many factors with the primary one from my experiences being that key stakeholders are on leave. This normally tends to last around 2 weeks maximum so as a rough lower time limit, I would suggest a change chill for you scenario could last around 2 weeks. The most typical change freeze or chill period is over the Christmas holidays with the freeze / chill ending at the start of January.

NOTE: You can create change blackout windows within the Change Management application that would essentially be a Change Freeze window, more info on that here.

Hope this helps.

Ethan

Please mark this answer as helpful or correct if is aids in solving your issue, thanks!