What's in this Success Playbook

This Success Playbook will teach you how to get started with ServiceNow to support DevOps. It will help you answer the following questions:

• How do I learn what DevOps teams need so I can figure out how to use ServiceNow to support them?
• What use cases are most relevant to supporting DevOps at my organization?
• What steps do I need to take to implement solutions on ServiceNow that will deliver value to DevOps teams while supporting our operational goals?

Key takeaways

The most important things to know
Through customer interviews, we’ve identified the two most important steps to support DevOps with ServiceNow:

1. First, do your homework. Learn how DevOps is working at your organization—how many teams there are, how they work, what tools they use, etc.—so you know how to support your DevOps teams effectively.

2. Second, identify and implement an initial use case (typically change automation) that can deliver value to many DevOps teams in your organization by integrating ServiceNow with DevOps tools (such as CI/CD pipeline tools) and improving and/or modifying operations on ServiceNow as needed.

The payoff of getting this right

• You’ll help your organization realize the expected value from DevOps by providing an effective system of record that is responsive enough to support the operational needs of continuous integration and continuous deployment.
• You’ll help maximize the value provided by operations supported on ServiceNow by ensuring that they get operationally relevant information from DevOps tools.
• You’ll prepare operations supported by ServiceNow to keep pace with DevOps demand, for example, increasing your rate of change.

Steps covered

Step 1 – Get visibility into how DevOps works at your organization

• Assign a champion to build a structured discovery process.

Step 2 – Identify where and how ServiceNow can deliver early value to DevOps

• Most organizations should start with one of three use cases: automating change management, automating audit reporting, or providing insights across your DevOps lifecycle on ServiceNow.
• Information from your discovery process (Step 1) is key to selecting the right initial use case and finding the right team to pilot with.

Step 3 – Plan and pilot your initial DevOps use case, then expand adoption

• Consider what data you need to share and how existing processes need to change before jumping to technical implementation.
• Plan how you’ll onboard new DevOps teams into your initial use case after the pilot.

Step 4 – Roadmap your plan to expand support for DevOps with ServiceNow

• Continue using the information you collected in your questionnaire (Step 1) to inform how you prioritize future work in your roadmap.
• Take advantage of the experience you gained by using the same process—and teams, when possible—to do future work.