Eliminate risk with Azure DevOps and ServiceNow Change Management integration

Remember the Facebook outage that occurred last year? Mark Zuckerberg lost a whopping $7billion within six hours and the whole episode cost the global economy $160million. However, did you know that the reason behind the outage was faulty change management? Yes, a configuration change made to one of the backbone routers caused cascading effects for the social media giant. Change management is more crucial to your enterprise than you may think.

Gartner estimates that nearly 50% of outages impacting mission critical services are caused by change/configuration/release process issues. It is important for enterprises to manage complex networks by investing in highly automated workflows for network configuration and change management. It is better to engage with a market leader like ServiceNow whose platform offers advanced capabilities to eliminate service impacts and risk at reduced costs.

ServiceNow Change Management and Azure DevOps integration:

In a DevOps ecosystem, collaborating with the right systems is essential for cross-functional teams as incident and change management are key to DevOps activities. The integration of Azure Pipelines with ServiceNow Change Management enhances coordination between development and IT teams. Enterprises can reduce the risk associated with changes with the addition of change management in CI/CD pipelines and follow the IT service management methodologies to gain DevOps benefits like transparency, traceability and minimized deployment time. ServiceNow Change Management extension for Azure DevOps supports in automating the process and helps in reducing the chances of manual errors and accelerates deployment agility.

With this integration, enterprises can add ServiceNow Change Management as a release gate to their pipelines and control the promotion of changes from one stage to another. When the release pipeline is executed, a new change request will be triggered in ServiceNow for review. The change request will be created with the parameter value provided in the gate and the pipeline will be paused until the change is approved and ready for implementation.

The integration is kept up-to-date as developers can add ‘update change request’ task to the deployment process in Azure pipelines and the ServiceNow change request will be kept updated with the status of deployment. Similarly, release information on the pipeline can be automatically captured in the change request for traceability enabling a complete end-to-end integration between both ServiceNow and Azure DevOps.

Why you must choose ServiceNow for Change Management

Dynamic change request: With deep integration of Azure DevOps and ServiceNow, it is possible to map dynamic change request types in ServiceNow Change Management templates like Standard, Normal and Emergency. Standard changes are a routine task and are generally low-risk. Normal changes affect overall business operations and need two-level approvals to be implemented during the scheduled maintenance window. Emergency changes are initiated when work is disrupted and need immediate attention. When a change request is synced with ServiceNow, the additional fields are populated as part of the dynamic template and synced back to Azure DevOps. This helps the internal team to identify the nature of request and its related priority status.

Data sync and visibility: A change request from Azure DevOps contains all the associated user stories and tasks in a tabular structure and provides 100% visibility to ServiceNow users. This helps the enterprise operation management or the Change Advisory Board (CAB) to grasp the impact of the change. ServiceNow helps CAB make informed decisions by presenting the visualization of the change’s impact using Performance Analytic tools.

Detect conflicts: ServiceNow provides the internal team with a change calendar which presents a real-time view of all the consolidated changes in an interactive timeline. This helps the Azure deployment team to identify any conflicts in schedule. ServiceNow can also automatically determine if the change request will impact any other associated change scheduled. It can also calculate the expected closure time of changes.

ServiceNow uses ITIL framework and follows industry best practices to act as a robust gatekeeper to all your IT changes and ensures there are no work disruptions. ServiceNow Change Management processes are designed to centralize procedures while enacting a change and monitor it throughout its lifecycle. ServiceNow’s well-defined workflows aids in automating end-to-end change lifecycle.

The Now platform not only reduces the threat of change-induced incidents but also works to enhance the quality of changes and achieve successful changes at first attempt. ServiceNow is empowered with a constellation of tools which assesses the impact and benefit of changes. It also follows the best standard processes to handle the changes made to the IT system, hence offering a competitive advantage to its users.