Last Thursday, 21 March 2019, we successfully completed our ServiceNow upgrade to the Madrid release. From project kick-off to closure we did it in just 9 days! A far cry from the 8 weeks these upgrades have taken us in the past.

Since early 2018, we at AC3 set ourselves the goal of keeping up to date with the ServiceNow biannual release cycle. We did this so that we can take immediate advantage of the great new features and improvements that continue to add value to our investment in ServiceNow.

Prior to 2018 our upgrades took weeks and involved many resources. Due to the high effort involved we would skip releases and perform an upgrade every 12-18 months. This all changed last year when we focused on two things; automated testing and rolling back customisations.

In 2018 we slashed the time to upgrade from 8 weeks down to 10 days. This was made possible by the automated test framework. ATF reduced the need for manual testing and since computers are far better than humans at performing repetitive steps consistently; it of course improved the quality and frequency of our testing.

To get us started we created a suite of tests against our main ITSM processes; Incident, Change, Problem and Knowledge. Since that time we’ve incorporated automated tests into our development & release policy. As my team promote work to production it must be accompanied by test cases against their work and evidence shown that existing tests continue to pass.

As our catalogue of tests has grown, so has the capability of the automated test framework. This has allowed us to broaden the coverage into more areas of the platform. Recent improvements have enabled testing of the Service Catalog, REST integrations, UI Navigator, Service Portal & Script includes. We have a domain separated instance and with this comes the complexity of many similar ServiceNow deployments running on the same instance. In this environment, being able to clone tests has allowed us to quickly build out test cases for each domain and reduce our effort for on boarding new tenants.

ATF doesn’t replace all testing and we have had post upgrade defects in our Kingston and London upgrades that should have been detected. So for this latest upgrade to Madrid we utilised the Test Management module for the first time. We migrated our test plans from several spreadsheets into ServiceNow. Doing this allowed us to better manage the test catalogue, divide the effort, coordinate the testers and easily report on their progress. As testament to the changes we made; this upgrade had absolutely no post upgrade defects!

The other area we focused on was customisations. We understand from experience that once you customise something you own it and you won’t receive future improvements on that item from ServiceNow. During an upgrade these customisations appear as conflicts and can be very time consuming to review. Ignoring those conflicts means you miss out on new functionality, accepting them introduces change and therefore risk. So it takes careful attention by our process owners and admins when reviewing each conflict. Prior to 2018 we were seeing around 600 conflicts and the number was growing. We felt this was unsustainable if we were to keep to our goal of upgrading twice a year.

So in between our upgrade projects we took a hard look at the customisations we have. We found that with each ServiceNow release, changes in the baseline configuration were made to areas that we had customised previously. The baseline ‘out of the box’ configuration was getting closer to our processes and therefore reduced the amount of customisation we needed. We also applied this to any new requirements that came from the business, putting a high cost to any customisation that was requested.

Reverting these customisations initially made little difference to our end users and was a cost in effort that was hard to justify. However the benefits became apparent when we were able to stick to our upgrade goal and more quickly realise new features and improvements that came with each release. Today we have reduced our count of conflicts from a high of almost 600 to just 21.

By focusing on these two areas and making them a part of our everyday we have made our upgrades easy. So it’s not surprising that now my team and the wider company look forward and even get excited about moving to a new release of ServiceNow.