Filling in the automatic assignment group: A small but significant update, Assignment group is now automatically filled with the support group of the selected CI. If the CI does not have a support group, the group of the service offering is populated instead.

Copying attributes from parent incidents: Gone are the days where we had to customize the Business Rule to update the fields that get copied from parent to child incident. With this update, updating the ‘List of Attributes’ on the Service Offering or Business Applications related lists of the new incident will enable the selected fields to be automatically updated from parent to child.

Plugins for solution definitions: Solution definitions for incident management and major incident management are now delivered via two separate plugins instead of the one.

• Predictive Intelligence for Incident Management plugin
• Predictive Intelligence for Major Incident Management plugin

ServiceNow ITSM Change Management

Change Models: One of the most significant updates to ServiceNow Change Management, is the improved Change Model that greatly enhances the traditional change types that we were so used to (hint: normal, emergency and standard). By activating the “Change Management – Change Model Foundation Data” plugin we gain the additional models of Change Registration, Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Ops (new in Quebec) and Unauthorized Change. With the ability to customize change models to adapt to client requirements and even have client defined states and state transitions for them. With additional updates to the user interface, these updates are sure to improve Change Management usability.

Predictive Intelligence: Use the benefits of machine-learning algorithms for ServiceNow to suggest Standard Templates, identify similar incidents and improve risk assessments for a change request.

Enable the “Change Management – Risk Intelligence” plugin to utilize similarity and categorization to provide insight into the potential risks of the change effort and helps in making intelligent approval decision making. Using this, clients can implement greater control over potential risk outcomes.
Enable the “Change Management – Standard Change Template Intelligence” plugin to use predictive intelligence to detect potential standard templates. This greatly reduces the need to manually study historical change records to make such an assessment. This even predicts the common fields of the template.

Change Velocity Dashboard: The latest in the Change Managers arsenal, the velocity dashboard adds multiple reports for current and historical changes. Divided into the Current Pipeline, Historical Pipeline, Process KPI’s and Process Optimization. However, The Process Optimization is only available with the ITSM Enterprise subscription. This dashboard enables Change Managers to view and assess change velocity from an individual, team and organization level. With multiple reports (19 by our count) this dashboard is bound to be a must have for clients in the future.

ServiceNow ITSM Agent Workspace

UI Actions for Incident & Problem Forms: Loaded with features as it is, now you can add/remove multiple existing records from a host of related lists. No longer will customization be needed to use this functionality, which is now available for the following Incident related lists – Affected CIs, Impacted Services/CIs, Child Incidents, Interaction, Outages, Affected Locations, and Service Offerings. This has been added to the following Problem related Lists – Incidents, Affected CIs, Change Requests, Outages, and Service Offerings.

Assignment Group Population: The assignment groups for Incident, Problem or Change requests get automatically populated with the support group of the Configuration Item or Service Offering. This triggers only when an Assignment group is not entered. The default value is support group which can be switched to any other group via its corresponding property.

These are the just a few of the multitude of changes made as part of the Quebec release for ServiceNow. There are really exciting updates made to a lot of Modules, the intuitive UI Builder or new Process Optimization features. We highly recommend to view the full list of changes in the ServiceNow Quebec Release Fact Sheet or in the more detailed ServiceNow Quebec Release notes.

If you are looking for a trusted partner to help you derive the maximum value from your ServiceNow investment, get in touch with Advance Solutions, a ServiceNow implementation expert and a leading Managed Service Provider.