As of the December 14th, 2023 ServiceNow release, Change Management has gone through an overhaul to simplify and streamline its look and workflow! 

Below you will find a quick overview on a majority of the updates, what they look like, and how you can use them to help make your life easier!

Creating A Change Request

The Create a change request overview has been updated for ease of use. You will see four options when you select "Create New" under Change Management

• Pinned - Where you'll find all standard change templates and change models you have pinned by clicking the "Pin" icon on the right side corner of any change tile.
• Models - Where you'll find the four types of change (Normal, Standard, Expedited, and Emergency)
• Preapproved - Where you'll find all the approved standard change templates that will have certain fields auto populated and skip the assess stage of the workflow
• All - Where you'll find all approved standard change templates and the four types of change together. 

Maintenance Type

While the functionality for maintenance type hasn't changed, it's important to go over what this field does.

Selecting "Disruptive" will create an Outage which means it will appear on the outage calendar as an event. 

Selecting "Non-Disruptive" will not create an outage.

If your change request IS disruptive but it is required that a public outage event not be made on the calendar, you can accomplish this by selecting the "Security Sensitive" checkbox in the Risk Assessment portion of the Change form. This will block an outage event from being created even if "Disruptive" is selected as the Maintenance Type.

Assignment Group Auto Populate

On a New change request you will notice that "Configuration Item" is one of the immediately required fields. A new auto populate rule is in place that will fill out the assignment group field automatically based on what you choose as the Configuration Item. As an added bonus we have limited the options in the Configuration Item field to only include Applications, Business Services, and Service Offering options so you will no longer need to wade through thousands of CI's to find the one you need. 

To test out the auto populate rule simply update the configuration item and save/update the change request. (Please note that once a change request leaves the "new" stage the Configuration Item field becomes read only and cannot be changed.)

Conflict Calendar

One of the buttons you'll notice at the top of your change form is the "Conflict Calendar" button: Selecting this button will immediately pull up a calendar showing any similar change requests concerning your Configuration item that may be happening at the same time as your planned start and end times.

You can also see these conflicts directly on the change request form by selecting "Check Conflicts" in the "Conflicts" tab

The system will check for conflicts every time you save/update the change request so if you see "Conflicts Detected" in your conflicts tab, simply click Check Conflicts to pull all that information into a grid view as displayed above. Detected conflicts will not limit your ability to schedule a Change, it is merely informational at this point for context while scheduling a Change.

Affected Locations

A new conditional field has been added to the change request form: If the Configuration Item is "Department Networks" then a new field named "Affected Locations" will appear:

Clicking on the lock will allow you to select locations from a list of campus buildings:

These locations are also preloaded with the emails of the appropriate people that need to be contacted for these change requests and will be notified when the change request form goes through.