Balancing Platform Upgrade Requirements with Business Deliverables - Seeking Best Practices

[adithyamasetti]

Hi Community,

I'm looking for guidance on how other organizations manage the resource demands of mandatory ServiceNow platform upgrades while maintaining delivery on business priorities.

Our Situation: We're currently dedicating significant team capacity to platform upgrade activities. We understand these upgrades are essential—delaying them puts us out of compliance and risks losing support coverage under our ServiceNow terms and conditions. However, the time required for upgrade work is impacting our ability to deliver on other critical initiatives, and we're looking for ways to optimize this balance.

The Challenge:

• Platform upgrades are non-negotiable due to compliance and support requirements
• Upgrade work is consuming most of our available capacity
• Business stakeholders are questioning why other priorities aren't progressing
• We need to better communicate the mandatory nature of this work and/or find more efficient approaches

Questions for the Community:

1. How do you structure your teams to handle mandatory upgrades without stalling other work?

   • Dedicated upgrade teams vs. shared responsibilities?
   • Offshore/vendor support for upgrade activities?

2. What strategies have you used to accelerate or streamline the upgrade process?

   • Automated testing tools?
   • Phased upgrade approaches?
   • Reducing customization footprint to simplify future upgrades?

3. How do you communicate the compliance/support requirements to business stakeholders?

   • What messaging has been effective in helping leadership understand this isn't optional?
   • How do you frame upgrade work in business terms (risk mitigation, cost avoidance, etc.)?

4. What planning approaches work best for balancing upgrade cycles with feature delivery?

   • Do you build upgrade windows into your annual roadmap?
   • How far in advance do you plan for upgrade resource needs?

5. Are there metrics or benchmarks for typical upgrade effort?

   • What percentage of team capacity should realistically go toward platform maintenance and upgrades?

What We're Hoping to Learn:

• Practical strategies to right-size upgrade efforts without compromising compliance
• Ways to maintain business delivery momentum during upgrade periods
• How to set realistic expectations with stakeholders about the mandatory nature of this work

Any real-world experiences, lessons learned, or best practices would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!