Manage Changes that does not relate a Business, Technical, or Application Service and a CI

Product Success Playbook

Manage Change Requests that does not relate a Service/Service Offering to a CI

A step-by-step guide to analyze and remediate service relationship in change requests

Table of Contents

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

Audience

Problem Overview

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

How this playbook is structured

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Downstream Consequences

Impact on Your Business

Engagement Questions

Remediation Plays

Summary

Play 1: Review your data

Play 2: Fix Play

Data Governance

References

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

To help identify gaps in the Change Management process related to the usage of a Configuration Item to the related Service & Service Offering for accurate risk and impact assessment for Change Requests for minimal service disruption.

Details about this playbook

Author

Bibu Elias Punnachalil

Reviewer

Date

08/06/2022

Addresses HSD #

HSD0003716

Applicable ServiceNow Releases

Quebec, Rome, San Diego

Prerequisites

CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards Version 2.0 or above

Time Required

Approximately 1 to 8 hours (depending on your environment)

Audience

Configuration Manager or Configuration Management team ServiceNow Administrators Change Management Process Owner or Change Management team

Problem Overview

A Change Request should record what configuration item, Business, Technical or Application Service(s) is impacted by the change. Service association can help identify the change window with minimal service disruption, accurate risk/impact assessment of the change and detection of unauthorized changes.

It is important to identify the actual IT Infrastructure component (CI) that is getting changed, as well as the Service it supports, and use its attributes for proper change request routing and escalation to achieve better Business Outcomes. As Services/ServiceOfferings tend to have Service Level Agreements and/or availability targets these cannot be improved/achieved unless any change is managed and tracked in a timely manner.

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

This playbook will guide on how to get visibility on how the changes are impacting your Services & Service Offerings

How this playbook is structured

This Playbook will guide you through 3 plays.

Play 1 (a review play) helps you identify if you have Change Requests that relate CIs and not a Service/Service Offering Play 2 (remediation) helps you ensure the Service/Service Offering field is visible on the form, so it can be filled out during the Change Request lifecycle Play 3 (a Data Governance play) lists the guidelines and processes for continuing to ensure your Change Requests are related to CI, Service Offering & Service.

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

People/Process - Change Request Workflow does not require the Service/Service Offering field to be populated, as users do not know what the Service should be, and the field is not marked mandatory to make Change request submission easy Company should have an inventory of Services which shows a map of CIs to the Services, so that users can identify them when filling out the form. Data Maturity - Services are not mapped and therefore cannot be automatically added to the Change request Process - CI field is not mandatory at the right stage in the change request lifecycle Data Quality - CIs and Services are difficult to locate and hence are not mandatory People - ServiceDesk agents are expected to triage the issue and fill in the CI field, but do not record it on the form Data Migration - Previous ITSM tool did not differentiate between CI , Service Offering & Service and they are recorded in the same field (cmdb_ci) Process - Placeholder CIs or ticket categorization are used instead. Proper Service cannot be identified by the placeholder Coverage – Service CIs are not in the CMDB and cannot be recorded on the change request form Customization - Change Request form was customized for other functionalities and the newer updates with Service/Service Offerings fields were skipped

Downstream Consequences

Data Consequence

Data loss - unable to report on Change request trends such as: Services with frequent Changes, Service Outages due to Change. Compliance failures (internal and external auditors) to identify what was changed Operation Consequence

Manual Process circumvention is prone to errors Unable to accurately assess service impact/risk without previous data Delays in decision making related to the service

App Consequence

Missing Data - unable to use automation and/or workflows that automatically assign Change requests based on CI change group or Service Ownership/Assignment information Missing Data - unable to use base features such as population of managed by and change group from the Service/Service Offering to all associated CIs Impact on Your Business

Not having the correct CI identified upfront can impact the following:

Incident Reduction Service Awareness Increase Operational Visibility Process Alignment Audit/Compliance Data Governance Process Automation Data Accuracy Data completeness

Engagement Questions:

Consider the answers to these questions:

How do you find a CI in your CMDB, so it can be added to the Change Request? How do you know what is getting changed? How do you assess Change Requests? How do you evaluate Impact and Urgency of a Change request? Are your Services defined? How about Maintenance Windows? Are your Services mapped? Do your Services have Service Level Agreements? How do you prevent failure in changes?

Remediation Plays

Summary

The table below lists and summarizes each of the remediation plays in the playbook. Details are included later.

Play Name

Play 1: Review Findings

What this play is about

Review count of Change Requests with CI and Service

Required tasks

Review Dashboard output

Play 2: Fix Play

What this play is about

Identify if you have the Service & Service Offering fields are visible on your change request form

Required tasks

Follow outlined step to add the field if it is not present on the form

Data Governance

What this play is about

Helps you establish standard operating procedures, as we ll as periodic data certification

Required tasks

Provides detailed advice, best practices and data audit instructions

Play 1 - Review your data

Identify if there are Changes without CIs and Services in your instance.

Required tasks

Navigate to Configuration  CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard. Open the tab ITSM Processes

Check the counter for Changes Not Relating Services to CI If the count is zero, this playbook is not applicable to you. If its non-zero, click on it to open the Analytics

Click on "Show Records" button to list change records having CI but missing Services

NOTE: If you are not using the provided out of the box fields for CI and Service you may have to create a custom report to accommodate your situation. It is recommended you read up on the CSDM and migrate to the provided fields instead.

If you are using Impacted Services to capture your services, consider using the primary service the CI supports in the appropriate field.

Play 2 – Fix Play

What this Play is about

In this play you will apply recommended fields to your change request process.

Additionally, as Infrastructure components can change in real time it is challenging to keep up with non-discoverable data, such as Change Group, Ownership, etc. The information can be derived from the Service those CIs belong to, if you have implemented our Common Service Data Model.

This section assumes you have your CIs mapped to the services they support.

Ensure you are following your internal development practice and make these changes in Dev and move them up to Production following your established SDLC processes.

Required tasks

Ensure that the Service and Service Offering field is visible on the form Open Create new Change Request form Are the Service and Service Offering field visible? If Yes, proceed to next step If No, right click the Change Request Form header, and click Configure > Form Design Drag the Business Service Field above Configuration Item to match our baseline Sample

Close the Form Design tab Refresh the Open a new Change Request page Test out submitting an Change Request with a Service & Service Offering populated The following items are visible once an Change request has been created with a Service populated Dependency View (BSM map) Other Active Tasks affecting this Business Service list Service details If you are using Agent Workspace, once a Service has been chosen, you can then easily view the Service record and see its attributes to help you determine Change request Impact and Urgency, resulting in more accurate Impact/Severity. You can also see all the items identified in the step above Once you have successfully completed the above task, consider also displaying the service_offering field. This will help you route Change requests based on Service Attributes instead of relying that Infrastructure CIs have accurate information

Data Governance

What this Play is about

This play lists the healthy habits around periodic validation of Change Request data.

Required tasks

Rerun Play 1 periodically, evaluate additional improvement steps to achieve higher compliance with properly tracking Services related to the Change Request Review and apply the Common Service Data Model across your organization Implement Service Mapping to better show dependency maps As your organization matures, periodically review your mapped services for accuracy and refresh them as necessary References

Install or Upgrade CMDB Data foundations dashboard Below playbook will help in installing/upgrading CMDB Data foundations dashboard.

Install and Upgrade CSDM and CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard

How Change Management leverages CSDM

Below community article details on how Dynamic CI Groups, impact analysis, and assignment groups all leverage our CSDM guidance to make Change Management better

How Change Management leverages CSDM

Congratulations

You have completed this Product Success Playbook .