Quick Start Guide for Change Management in SOW

Daniela Kutryan · ‎08-07-2023

Welcome to ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace for Change Management

Quick Start Guide

If you’re just starting your Change Management in Service Operations Workspace (SOW) journey, then you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you get up to speed on activating and realizing value from SOW and is a great place to come back to as the product evolves over time.

Let’s get started!

Guide Overview

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

Overview of the Change Management Experience in SOW
What are the business outcomes you can expect?
What to know before getting started
Steps to quick success
Other helpful resources

Change Management in Service Operations Workspace

The Service Operations Workspace enhances the change management process by providing contextual information, promoting data-driven and adaptive practices, and ultimately minimizing risks.

Service Operations Workspace streamlines change management with features that include: 

Multimodal change that allows for customization of change activities and flows to better serve specific use cases
Dynamic overview page presents contextual information based on the change activities, providing a more informed perspective
Improved change scheduling experience that provides comprehensive scheduling view that that highlights potential conflicts, including blackout windows and related changes

What are the business outcomes you can expect from Change Management?

Before you start to implement Change Management in SOW, it’s critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. Change Management allows you to deliver many positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals.

Service Operations Workspace benefits:

Empower your teams with a seamless and intuitive experience for managing changes that leverages highly automated and data-driven capabilities
Accelerate change velocity using built-in AI and fit-for-purpose change models—for faster time to value
Enable data-driven and adaptive practices to minimize change risk and impact

Before Getting Started

Since Service Operations Workspace is a configurable workspace developed with the Next Experience UI, it is important to keep the following in mind:

Customer Type	New and upgraded customers from Utah release will have access to Service Operations Workspace Change Management if they are ITSM Standard customers. For advanced change management capabilities, like Risk Assessment, customers need to upgrade to a ITSM Pro license.
Workspace Status	Identify whether you have teams working in the Agent workspace or not. Agent Workspace can be continued to be used in Utah, but customers will not be able to take advantage of our latest configurable Change Management experience which is built using the new full-featured UI Builder. We encourage customers who are not using workspaces to begin exploring our configurable workspace solutions after upgrading to Washington DC or newer.
Release Strategy	Consider how you will deploy the new configurable Change Management experience to your production instance. It is highly recommended to activate the application in your sub-production environment and perform upgrade/regression testing to ensure your instance is operating as expected. Remediate any prior user interface customizations and activate the Change experience in SOW with any remediation as part of your organization's normal release process to make the configuration changes in your production instance.

Steps to quick success

Step 0: Service Operations Workspace for Change Management

Learn about Service Operations Workspace for Change Management via our product documentation.

Step 1: Upgrade to the Washington DC release or newer

Upgrade to Washington DC or newer on a sub-production instance if you haven't already. We encourage you to read the family version release notes and follow your normal upgrade process. For helpful information see the upgrade planning checklist. If you're new to upgrades, check out our NowLearning course: ServiceNow Upgrade Essentials.

Step 2: Install Service Operations Workspace Applications

Change Management in Service Operations Workspace is available via the ServiceNow Store. Update to SOW 2.0, released in Utah, or later to get the full experience of SOW Change. Install the app on your sub-prod instance for testing and validation. If you are on Service Operations Workspace version 1.3 or earlier agents will be allowed to create change requests, but it does not allow them to manage changes through the entire change lifecycle.

Step 3: Configure Change Experience and Service Operations Workspace for ITSM

To configure your Change Management experience, start with defining your change process. If you are moving from Agent Workspace, then you do not need to move to a new process to use SOW Change. With SOW Change, you can configure the dynamic overview page to surface the needed sections and fields for each change state to help focus users on the job-to-be-done and not be distracted/overwhelmed by numerous optional change fields.

Below are a a few examples of configuration modifications:

Updating the 'New' state
- By default, a 'New' change record only includes the summary section. You can optionally add the schedule section to a new change request, for example: if the planned start date and planned end date are mandatory for a new change in your company change process.
Add sections to be visible in multiple states
Reorder sections within a change state
Add or reorder fields in within sections

Step 4a: Learn about the Workspace UI

A workspace is a suite of tools that provides personas such as agents, case managers, service desk

professionals, managers, and other process users with the tools to assist customers quickly and perform process-based tasks. 

Step 4b: Learn about UI Builder

Create and customize workspace pages with UI Builder or create custom web experienced using NextExperience Components and custom web components.

Step 5: Explore further

Now that you've implemented Service Operations Workspace and the Change Management experience, you are ready to take the next step into configuring and customizing workspaces and landing pages with UI Builder. Explore the community site to learn more about Service Operations Workspace and the Next Experience community site to learn how to customize your workspace.

Other helpful resources

Change Management in Service Operations Workspace product documentation.
If you are new to ServiceNow, we also strongly recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into using the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available.