Is a Change Freeze necessary in ServiceNow?

Erik Richter · ‎07-28-2022

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?

Ethan Davies · ‎07-29-2022

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

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