ServiceNow Seven Best Practices for User and Group Management: A Guide for Platform Administrators

[Bill Martin]

In this article, I will be discussing Seven (7) Best Practices for User and Group Management for Platform Administrators.

 

As a ServiceNow platform administrator, effective management of users and groups is a critical responsibility. Properly managing these elements ensures that users have the appropriate access to perform their tasks while maintaining the security, compliance, and efficiency of the system. Here are some best practices tailored specifically for platform administrators to help you optimize user and group management within your ServiceNow environment.

 Proper management ensures that users have the right level of access to perform their tasks while safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining the integrity of the system.

Below are seven (7) best practices for managing users and groups in ServiceNow.

Let us drill down!

1. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

• Define Clear Role Structures:

  • Begin by defining a clear role structure within your ServiceNow environment. Roles should be aligned with the different job functions within your organization, such as IT Support, HR, or Finance. Ensure that roles are created based on the principle of least privilege, where users are granted only the access necessary to perform their duties.

• Use Roles, Not Direct Permissions:

  • Avoid assigning permissions directly to individual users. Instead, assign roles that encapsulate the necessary permissions. This approach simplifies the management of user access and ensures consistency across the platform.

• Regular Role Reviews:

  • Schedule regular reviews of all roles within the system to ensure they remain relevant and correctly aligned with organizational needs. As roles and responsibilities evolve, update the roles accordingly to reflect changes in job functions or security requirements.

2. Centralize Group Management

• Group-Based Role Assignment:

  • Leverage groups to manage role assignments efficiently. Assign roles to groups rather than individual users whenever possible. This makes it easier to manage large numbers of users, especially when organizational changes occur, such as departmental restructuring or onboarding of new teams.

• Logical Group Organization:

  • Organize groups logically based on organizational structure, such as by department, team, or function. Use descriptive and consistent naming conventions to make it easy for other administrators to identify the purpose of each group.

• Minimize Group Overlap:

  • Avoid excessive overlap between groups to prevent confusion and potential security issues. Ensure that each group has a clear and distinct purpose, with minimal overlap in roles and permissions.

3. Automate User and Group Management

• Automated Onboarding and Offboarding:

  • Implement automated processes for onboarding new users and offboarding departing employees. This can be done through ServiceNow’s Flow Designer or by integrating with identity management systems like Active Directory. Automation ensures that user accounts are created, modified, or deactivated promptly and reduces the risk of human error.

• Automated Role Assignment:

  • Use automated rules to assign roles based on user attributes such as job title, department, or location. This helps ensure that new users receive the appropriate access automatically upon creation of their accounts.

• Scheduled Audits and Reports:

  • Set up automated audits and reports to regularly review user roles, group memberships, and permissions. These reports can help identify discrepancies, such as inactive users with active accounts or users with roles that no longer match their job functions.

4. Maintain Clear Documentation and Naming Conventions

• Document Everything:

  • Maintain detailed documentation of all roles, groups, and their associated permissions. This documentation should include the purpose of each role and group, the permissions they provide, and the users or teams they are associated with. Clear documentation helps ensure continuity and clarity, especially when onboarding new administrators or during audits.

• Consistent Naming Conventions:

  • Establish and enforce consistent naming conventions for users, groups, and roles. For example, use prefixes to indicate the department (e.g., “HR_” for HR-related groups) or role type (e.g., “Admin_” for administrative roles). Consistent naming makes it easier to manage and search for specific entities.

• Version Control for Changes:

  • Implement version control for any changes made to roles, groups, or user permissions. Document the reasons for the changes, the date of implementation, and who authorized the change. This practice ensures accountability and provides a clear audit trail.

5. Conduct Regular Security Reviews

• User Access Reviews:

  • Conduct periodic reviews of user access rights to ensure that permissions remain appropriate for each user’s current role. Look for users with excessive or outdated permissions and adjust their access accordingly.

• Inactive Account Management:

  • Regularly review and deactivate inactive user accounts. Inactive accounts that remain active can pose significant security risks, as they may be targeted for unauthorized access.

• Group Membership Reviews:

  • Periodically review group memberships to ensure users are only members of the groups necessary for their current job functions. Remove users from groups they no longer need to be part of to minimize potential security risks.

6. Handle Special Access Needs with Care

• Temporary Access Controls:

  • For users who require temporary access to specific roles or resources, establish a process to grant and automatically revoke access after a specified period. This ensures that temporary access does not become permanent by accident.

• Segregation of Duties (SoD):

  • Implement SoD controls to prevent conflicts of interest and reduce the risk of fraud. For example, ensure that no single user has the ability to both approve and execute financial transactions within the system.

• Careful Management of Custom Roles:

  • When creating custom roles, be cautious to ensure they do not grant excessive permissions inadvertently. Custom roles should be regularly reviewed and updated as necessary to reflect changes in responsibilities and security requirements.

7. Educate and Train Administrators

• Ongoing Administrator Training:

  • Provide ongoing training for platform administrators to ensure they are up-to-date on the latest best practices for user and group management. Training should cover the use of automation tools, security protocols, and the management of roles and groups.

• Sandbox Testing:

  • Encourage administrators to test changes in a sandbox environment before applying them to the production environment. This reduces the risk of errors that could impact live users or system stability.

• Peer Reviews for Significant Changes:

  • Implement a peer review process for significant changes to user roles, group memberships, or permissions. Having another administrator review the changes before implementation can help catch potential issues or oversights.

Conclusion

As a ServiceNow platform administrator, your role in managing users and groups is crucial to maintaining the security, compliance, and efficiency of the platform. By following these best practices—such as implementing RBAC, centralizing group management, automating processes, maintaining clear documentation, conducting regular reviews, and providing ongoing training—you can ensure that your ServiceNow environment remains secure, organized, and aligned with your organization’s needs. These practices not only protect sensitive data but also enhance the overall functionality and user experience of the platform.

I have created this video to give you a picture on how to create ServiceNow Users, Groups and Roles:

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[BrunoPer]

What would be the steps we should take as due diligence to ensure that processes (rules, scripts, etc), workflows, and so on, are not ineffective or broken if an assignment group is removed/disabled?

[Bill Martin]

When we talk about “removing” an assignment group, I’d first zoom out a bit. In most ServiceNow environments, a group isn’t just a value on the form – it’s part of your operating model. It carries roles, drives routing, and shows up in reports and approvals. Because of that, my default stance is: we manage people (membership and roles) much more often than we retire groups. Actually deactivating a group should be a conscious design decision, not a housekeeping task.

With that in mind, due diligence for me starts with the lifecycle question: is the function behind this group really going away, or is the work just moving somewhere else? If the work is moving, I focus first on membership and access – move the right people into the new group, review the roles they get from both groups, and make sure access follows the work rather than being left behind in an old structure.

Only when I’m comfortable that the underlying function is changing, not just the org chart, do I treat the old group as a candidate for retirement.

From there, I look at dependencies in a few broad areas instead of chasing individual records.

For routing and automation, I start with configuration: assignment rules, data lookup, and any other logic that explicitly sends work to that group.

The risk here is simple: if those rules keep pointing at a retired group, you’re routing work into a black hole.

For workflows and flows, I do a similar pass in Flow Designer and any remaining Workflow Editor models to find steps where the group is used as approver, fulfiller, or escalation owner. That’s where you get stalled approvals and broken SLAs without obvious alerts, so I want those scenarios eliminated before anyone touches the group record.

Scripts are more of a safety net than a primary tool, but they matter. I’ll use code search and some targeted queries on script tables to catch any hardcoded references to a group name or Sys ID. If I find them, the fix for me is not “search and replace the ID,” it’s a design change: move that logic toward configuration‑driven or data‑driven patterns so we’re not repeating the same exercise next time the org changes. That’s the kind of technical debt you only want to pay off once.

Finally, there is the data side. Here I do think about task tables, but as an impact assessment, not as “the” dependency map. I’ll use reports on the key task tables (incidents, changes, problems, RITMs, catalog tasks) to understand how much live work is sitting with that group and to plan a controlled reassignment.

The concern is twofold: you don’t want to create orphaned work by retiring the group too early, and you don’t want to corrupt your metrics because half of last quarter’s tickets now appear to be assigned to “nobody.” So that reassignment step is managed and visible, not buried in a one‑off background script.

If you discover you’re having this conversation often – “what happens if we remove this group?” – that’s usually a sign the group model itself needs attention. At that point I stop treating it as an individual question and start looking at group taxonomy, group types, and lifecycle rules: how groups are created, when they can be merged or retired, and what checks we always run before we say “this group is done.” That is where the architectural value really is: designing the governance so the next time the organization changes, you already know what “good due diligence” looks like instead of starting from zero.

[BrunoPer]

Thanks for your extensive feedback!
How useful do you think a tool like SN Utils will become, especially when running code searches?

[Bill Martin]

I haven’t actually brought SN Utils into my own toolkit yet, so I can’t give you a hands‑on review.

Conceptually though, I’m very supportive of tools that reduce friction for admins and developers.

If it helps you find code faster and focus more on solving problems than clicking around the UI, that’s a win.

At the same time, it is still a third‑party browser extension with its own codebase and licensing, so from a governance point of view I’d always run it through the same security and browser‑policy checks as any other external tool your organization adopts.

[BrunoPer]

thanks for your feedback Bill. Really appreciated!