London release: How to accelerate upgrades and make them easier

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The ServiceNow London release is bringing some exciting new capabilities. 

But actually doing the upgrade can be challenging – especially if you don’t know where to begin or what steps to take. The good news is that ServiceNow has a framework and tools that will accelerate your upgrade and make it easier.

Upgrade Best Practices Guide

First, there’s the upgrade best practices guide. This guide offers a five-stage plan based on 10 years of ServiceNow experience performing upgrades – informed by customer feedback of what actually works and what doesn’t. The five stages are:

Stage 1: Use a project management application.Treat your upgrade like any other project so your time, resources, and costs are visible to everyone.

Stage 2: Follow the documented ServiceNow upgrade process to ensure you stay on track.

Stage 3: Review skipped changes and make decisions about them.

Stage 4: Create and maintain your test plans before you upgrade to standardize the process— and shorten testing and upgrade time.

Stage 5: Streamline and future-proofyour upgrades by following the technical best practices and check for vulnerabilities.

Automated Testing Framework (ATF)

The ServiceNow Automated Test Framework or "ATF" was introduced with Istanbul, but has constantly been improved
and is rapidly gaining traction.

 A recent Product Lab survey found that testing was the biggest barrier to upgrades. Over 43% of the time that customers needed for upgrades was for testing and verification.

 Developing regression tests in ATF helps significantly accelerate release adoption and reduce testing burden on end users and business stakeholders by putting initial and repeated testing in the hands of the system administrators and automation. And 69% of ServiceNow customers using the tool said ATF that had already reduced their test time. 

And ATF is already saving customers substantial time in performing upgrades. We recently heard from a customer whose previous upgrade had taken six weeks. They decided to upgrade to Kingston as soon as it came out – they took their 200 manual tests from their Excel spreadsheet, and got 90% of those tests into ATF in one week. And then it only took them another week to complete the upgrade.

Unlike external testing tools, you don’t have to pay extra for ATF, and your developers don’t have to learn something new. Automated testing is a gift that keeps on giving, whether it is used for monthly upgrades or as part of your release and quality management processes.

It's easy to develop ATF tests from scratch. And in London we’re shipping the first sample tests that customers can use as a starting point. Those will initially be for Customer Service Management, but there will be more sample tests for each of the other products coming in later releases.

 Our Professional Service organization has also made ATF implementation a core part of our ServiceNow Implementation Methodology.

 
Preparing for Upgrades When You Have Significant Customizations

If you’ve been on the Now Platform more than five years, you might have upgrade and performance challenges. Some customizations prevent the ability to take advantage of new features – and you might have made customizations to address tasks or fields that are now standard or configurable in London. 

In those cases, an instance reset provides an opportunity to realign processes with the out of the box capabilities of the platform. This simplifies upgrading, as well as ongoing administration, and reliability.

ServiceNow Professional Services team offers upgrade assessment services to help you gauge your readiness for upgrades. These are powered by ServiceNow HealthScan, a tool that combs your instance, gives you an “upgradeability score” with the ability to drill down into data points about those things that should be remedied before upgrading.

Upgrading is exciting. It’s a chance to improve processes, become more efficient and use new features and capabilities that will make your world of work – work better for you. Take advantage of ServiceNow’s best practices and Automated Testing Framework to accelerate and simplify your London upgrade. And if your customizations make you feel like your stuck – there is a path forward – just reach out to your Professional Services executive.

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