Migration to flow designer for change request

[Michael208]

Hello Community,

Quebec release introduced important updates on change management, peculiarly the flow designer now supports the change request process instead of workflow as I can see it on my personal development instance.

One of my customers recently upgraded from Paris to Rome, but the change request is still driven by the workfow, not the flow designer.

Do you know any utility or process to migrate from workflow to flow designer ?

Any information would be appreciated.

[ronprice · Accepted solution]

There are a few steps in this process.  For Flow support, ServiceNow transitioned to a process that uses Model instead of Type as the driver for the various Flows.  The Flows are built with triggers that look for the Model field so they will not run if this feature isn't enabled.  To enable it, you need to set a couple of new system properties:

com.snc.change_management.change_model.hide - set to false
com.snc.change_management.change_model.type_compatibility set to false

Once this is done, when you create a new Change Request you will see a different interceptor that looks like the below:

By selecting one of the above, the Model field on the Change Request gets set, which then allows the trigger for the Flow(s) to kick in.

There are other potential considerations though.  You may need to update the conditions on your workflows to exclude changes where the Model is set.  The out of the box workflow has had this condition added, but if you've customized it, you will need to do this yourself - otherwise both the Flow and Workflow will execute.  You should also review UI Policies, business rules, scripts, etc. for any logic that was based on Type since you may need to update it.  Type did not go away though, so it's possible that you won't have to change that logic.

Good luck!

Please mark as helpful/correct if this answered your question.

[Jonatan Horvath]

Helpful tip, thanks!

We just transitioned to Change Flows from Workflows. And this is how we did it:

Make sure these 3 Flows are active on your instance;
Change - Normal - Assess
Change - Normal - Authorize
Change - Normal - Implement
if not, ask ServiceNow support for help to activate them.

Set following properties to FALSE; 
com.snc.change_management.change_model.hide
com.snc.change_management.change_model.type_compatibility

Modify existing Change Workflows for Standard Change, Emergency Change and Normal Change to go from Start -> End. Remove the other line from Start.
Important, do not deactivate the workflows or your active changes wont work.

In order for your current Standard Changes to work with flows, you need to modify each one of them. Its enough to just open the Template Management, select a standard template to modify and then just Request Approval. This will trigger a script that will set the model of that template to Standard, which is needed to run the Standard Change Flow.

Afterwards, I recommend to keep track of when the last Change is closed that ran the old workflow. When its complete, you can deactivate the workflows.