ITSM Pro: Digital Product Release End-to-end visibility into the release process and automated release readiness Digital Product Release (DPR) is a component of ITSM Professional and ITSM Enterprise. It is a release process orchestrator, enabling product teams, either central or distributed, to plan and deliver new versions of software products consistently within the automated guardrails and visibility of central IT. DPR is designed to help organizations manage the process in which they ensure products or applications are ready to deploy. DPR works with the development, testing, and deployment tools that you already use. Release Management and the shift from waterfall to continuous delivery Traditionally, release management was part of a waterfall process, often driven by central IT and revolving around a “project” based way of working – where product/application features are bundled and released together as a part of a larger release package. This traditional method helped to provide oversight into quality and compliance of code moving to production, but at the same time also led to inefficiencies (e.g. Arduous governance, repetitive administrative work) that slowed down the rate of releases, and as a result, innovation. That method did not scale well as products increased in both number and complexity. As more organizations embraced agile and DevOps principles, this led to an evolution in release management. Modern release management operates under a “product” based way of working, where we see decentralized product teams autonomously planning, building, testing, and deploying their products on a more frequent basis. In this modern release paradigm central IT is less focused on directly managing all release activities/validations and instead looks to define proper controls and guardrails to support these distributed product teams in getting their work released in a compliant fashion. This is precisely what DPR was built to do – help provide the process governance over releases to give a company’s central release team visibility into what is being released while defining policies that drive necessary compliance with minimal overhead. Agile methodologies create release challenges To keep pace with the need for innovation, organizations embraced agile methodologies and shifted from a project-based to a federated, product-based way of planning, building, and delivering. While this shift has numerous benefits (increased release and innovation velocity, quicker feedback, etc.), it also comes with its own set of challenges, such as: • Central IT loses visibility into release as teams decentralize • Central IT governance can become a barrier instead of an enabler to properly support, in a non-intrusive fashion, these product teams in releasing and realizing the benefits of frequent deployments • As software products become more complex and numerous, release validation, particularly if it is manual, takes more and more time • Decentralized product teams are unsure of when they are ready to release without guidance from Central IT • With no dedicated release management solution, teams have augmented change process to accommodate release, making change overloaded Dashboards display release progress, tasks status, and more. Observe the release start and end dates, status of tasks and policies, change requests, and more for each release. Template builder for tasks and policies for major releases. Define reusable, fit-for- purpose templates with mapped tasks and policies for each phase of the release View the planned timing and features for multiple releases with release planning. Modern Release with ServiceNow Digital Product Release (DPR With DPR, you have a dedicated release management solution that will enable you to: • Provide central IT with end-to-end visibility into release readiness across products being delivered • Leverage release policies and fit- for-purpose release templates to automate validation of release readiness • Empower product teams to know when they are ready to release and how their work is measured • Simplify cumbersome release and change processes, accelerating both processes Why release management from ServiceNow? DPR makes the most of the ServiceNow platform to integrate with numerous data sources and then build workflows and automation using that data to drive efficiency and optimization. For releasing software products, the planning, development, and deployment entails the use of numerous tools and ServiceNow is unique in the way that it can integrate with all those tools and combine that information with what we already know about a product in ServiceNow. With that information in ServiceNow, DPR enables data-driven validation of release readiness – drastically reducing the manual release checks of the past and making it easier to scale software delivery. If you have IT Service Management Professional or Enterprise, you already are entitled to use DPR to extend your management of product value streams. DPR and DevOps Change Velocity DevOps Change Velocity is also provided as a component of ITSM Professional or Enterprise. While DPR does not require DevOps Change Velocity to be deployed, it can leverage the DevOps data model to integrate with 3rd party CI/CD tools and use that data to drive automation via policy checks. The CI/CD tool integration experience within DPR is lifted directly from DevOps Change Velocity and will gain from further integrations with the evolution of DevOps Change Velocity. Additionally, DPR can automate change creation if DevOps Change Velocity is also deployed. © 2024 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks a re trademarks and/or regis tered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries . Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. SN-DataSheet-DPR-03072024 servicenow.com Key Features Release Templates Fit-for-purpose templates configured to your release process Data-driven validation Policies to automatically validate release compliance based on CI/CD and ServiceNow record data Approval definitions User-defined, approval tasks Product and version management Request/manage products and release versions Change requests Raise change requests with release traceability Release dashboards Visibility into release health and execution status Guided setup Simplify the administrative setup experience for DPR