Untangling Years of Customizations: How Do We Get Back to OOB?

[becks_kirk]

My organization has been using ServiceNow since at least the Eureka release. Over the years, we’ve significantly over-customized the platform. In many cases, we built custom functionality before ServiceNow provided an out-of-the-box (OOB) solution—functionality that is now natively supported. We’re only now in a position to step back and begin untangling all of the customizations we’ve accumulated.

We’re starting with a major initiative: reverting the entire Change Management application back to its OOB configuration, with only minimal adjustments to meet our organizational needs. This will be a substantial shift for our teams, but a necessary one.

Where I need help is understanding how to begin. What does a solid “revert to OOB” checklist look like? Any guidance or best practices would be greatly appreciated.

#changemanagement #itsm #oob 

[RobertB61064003]

Hey Becks,

How did you get on with this?

I’d add that I agree with the other responses — I’ve gone down the replatform/zBoot route a few times to achieve this outcome.

That said, the current client isn’t keen on that approach, so I’m exploring alternative options… none of which sound particularly great.

I’ve been toying with the idea of capturing the OOTB configurations in an update set, merging them back in, and creating mapping business rules from the new states to the old. But the more I think it through, the more I run into blockers and what looks like a huge amount of rework.

Any advice (if there is any!) would be very welcome 🙂