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 Emir Eminovic Date 08/06/2022 Addresses HSD # HSD0003716 Applicable ServiceNow Releases All Releases 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 teamServiceNow 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 OfferingPlay 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 lifecyclePlay 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 SummaryThe 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 well 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 CIIf 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 Close the Form Design tab Refresh the Open a new Change Request page Sample Test out submitting an Change Request with a Service & Service Offering populatedThe 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.