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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ScottW136642927 · ‎06-17-2025

Hello ServiceNow Community!

I have a different scenario where we cannot avoid change freezes.

I am the ITSM Change Manager for a utility company. We use many different applications and platforms, and we document changes to those in ServiceNow.

Aside from the set holiday change freezes (we allow emergency and standard changes to be implemented in production), often have change freezes due to severe weather. This an important aspect, as failed changes could disrupt or take down services that are crucial to restoring power and communicating with our customers.

Our change freeze process is very tedious and completely manual. We have to reach out to each change coordinator that have changes scheduled in the freeze period, and ask them for their feedback - reschedule (to the contingency date) or cancel. This is done via email and can be a process that can take more hours than necessary. Also, there is a high chance of nt getting a response before the freeze begins.

My goal is to semi-automate this process. When a freeze is declared, and we enable the freeze, I would like for the change coordinators to be automatically notified, and have the ability to select the first contingency date in the change. Once selected, have an additional approval requirement for the supervisor to "re-approve" the change for the freeze period. This would cut out the back-and-forth of emails and IMs.

This is a very short description of what the situation is., but finding a way to simplify this and cut the manual work would be great.

Anybody have experience with this, or have any suggestions?