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Avoid customization pitfalls so you can innovate and meet demand at scale

What’s in this Success Playbook Successful customers limit their customization to clear, demonstrated business needs and avoid the management pitfalls that lead to excessive, unsustainable customization. This Success Playbook will show you how to:

• Build governance policies and structures that promote business-smart customization—configuration and custom development that delivers clear, validated business value in response to demand

• Use recommended development mechanisms and tools to minimize technical complexity

Key takeaways The most important things to know • Get to business-smart customization—establish guidelines to define customization that

delivers business value.

• Define the right governance models to effectively meet and deliver on demands for customization.

The payoff of getting this right Avoiding customization pitfalls minimizes your technical debt and ensures faster testing cycles during upgrades. Excess customization that doesn’t serve a clear business purpose can actually inhibit your ability to take advantage of new innovations available with upgrades.

What you need to get started Leadership support

Make sure you have a clear governance structure in place for ServiceNow to administer the policies you put in place for business-smart customization.

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Playbook overview Follow these stages to achieve business-smart customization:

Stage 1 – Define business case guidelines

Stage 2 – Establish governance

Stage 3 – Define the development model

Stage 4 – Learn customization demands

Key insights • Get to business-smart customization.

• Establish guidelines to define customization that delivers business value.

• Define the right governance models to effectively meet demands for customization.

Terms and definitions Customization refers to business demands for custom functionality. When referring to implementation, this guide will refer to both configuration and custom development (both on ServiceNow® applications and new applications).

Configuration includes capabilities and/or features on the Now Platform® that enable organizations to deliver against “custom” business demands in a safe and supported way (such as modifications to forms or table extensions). While organizations should avoid overconfiguration—for example, by adding excessive forms or UI policies—they should still use configuration as a first or preferred option to meeting business demands.

Custom development includes custom development on both ServiceNow applications as well as the development of new applications by changing baseline business rules or developing new applications from table extensions. Custom development is recommended only where configuration cannot meet business demands and should employ recommended tools and methods (outlined in Step 3 of this document) as well as be supported by clear governance.

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Stage 1 – Define business case guidelines

Clear, validated business requirements are at the heart of business-smart customization. Use an explicit statement of business objectives, an understanding of ServiceNow functionality at a desk level, and simple scoring mechanisms to evaluate and prioritize demands for customization.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Guidelines for business-smart customization should be defined first by your North Star: the objectives and value you’re trying to capture with ServiceNow.

• Use interviews to discover whether or not customization is required to deliver these objectives at the “desk level” of the individual user.

Business-smart customization Business-smart customization comes down to one simple equation: Does customization deliver business value that is greater or less than the cost required to maintain it?

Begin by going back to your original business objectives and use cases before you evaluate specific configurations and custom applications. Then answer these two questions:

1. What business objectives and value are we trying to capture with ServiceNow? Demands and use cases for customization should be tied to relevant business objectives and desired business outcomes from the Now Platform.

To answer this question, engage the executive sponsor and/ or key IT and business process owners to define and prioritize the business objectives and associated value metrics for your ServiceNow implementation.

2. How is ServiceNow working today at a desk level? Now Platform owners should invest the time and resources necessary to understand the workflows of users—especially process users like service desk personnel, who use ServiceNow to carry out their daily work—to determine where customization can help and where older customization is getting in the way or not functioning as intended.

Conduct interviews (either one on one or through focus groups) with process owners and a sample of service consumers, process users, and developers. Interviews should help you

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understand where customization can improve workflow and adoption, and where it isn’t necessary. Use our sample interview template to get started.

EXPERT TIP Guidelines for business-smart customization should be defined first by your North Star: the objectives and value you’re trying to capture with ServiceNow.

Interview template

1. Is there a documented guide, diagram, and/or flowchart for the process? (Process owner)

2. Could you demo the process as it functions in ServiceNow? (Process owner)

3. How does this process integrate with other processes? (Process owner)

4. Are there process activities today that are no longer useful? (Process owner)

5. Are there any process improvement activities that are in flight or under consideration? (Process owner)

6. How clear is the process in ServiceNow? Where could it be made simpler? (Service consumer, process user)

7. What integration and interfaces to other ServiceNow modules or other systems are in place? How well are these documented? (Process owner, service developer)

8. What ServiceNow features work well? What could be improved? (Process owner)

9. What ServiceNow features have been problematic during upgrades? (Process owner)

Evaluate customization to determine costs vs. real value Once you’ve revalidated your business objectives and use cases, these three steps will help you decide which configurations and custom applications deliver enough real value to merit implementation.

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Step 1: Score your configurations and custom applications by the business value they deliver

Individual configurations and custom applications can also be assigned a simple “value score” that reflects how critical they are to business value realization. Perform the “North Star” assessment of your business value objectives and use cases as described above, and use that information when you analyze specific customizations. Table 1 illustrates a simple rating you can apply to common customization scenarios.

Use Table 1 as a starting point. Scoring should be consistent with your organization’s existing model for requirements management, using standard business value criteria that business analysts employ to prioritize requirements and/or user stories.

VALUE SCORE DESCRIPTION

5 – Mandatory Customization is required for regulatory and compliance purposes.

4 – Critical Customization is a "must have" to realize a business value objective and/or adoption requirements.

3 – Medium Customization supports realization of a business value objective and/or adoption, but workarounds are available.

2 – Low Customization supports service experience for service consumers, process users, and/or developers, but does not necessarily promote a business value objective or adoption.

1 – No Values Customization does not support improved service experience, value realization, or adoption.

Table 1: Value scoring for individual customizations (includes both configuration and custom applications)

Step 2: Score common customization scenarios by their potential to impact upgrades, performance, or technical debt Most configurations and customizations can be assigned a low, medium, or high “complexity score” to reflect their volatility and the potential risk they present to upgrades, technical debt, and/or performance. Figure 1 shows a simple rating for common customization scenarios and the minimum level of business value that a new configuration or custom application should deliver to warrant implementation. Business value, per the table outlined above, takes into account improvements to user experience, adoption/usage, compliance, or the accomplishment of business objectives.

These complexity scores reflect a simple low, medium, or high rating. Your platform experts can assign this rating based on experience with upgrades, data on past support issues, and/or the level of testing required to validate the customization. You can also consult with ServiceNow experts for additional guidance.

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CONFIGURATION OR CUSTOM APPLICATION SCENARIO

COMPLEXITY SCORE (DEFINED BY POTENTIAL RISK TO PERFORMANCE AND/OR TIME TO UPGRADE

WHAT MINIMUM LEVEL OF BUSINESS VALUE SHOULD CUSTOMIZATION DELIVER?

Modification to form layout/design

LOW This will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, although poorly planned layouts may disrupt user experience.

Low

Add fields and/or UI policies to forms

LOW This will typically not delay upgrades or new fuctionality, but overconfiguration of forms (e.g., adding 50+ fields) risks both service experience and usage.

Low-Medium

Build simple custom integration LOW Integrations that can use IntegrationHub (see below) will not typically delay upgrades or new functionality.

Low

Extend an existing table (e.g., incident) in scope with new fields only

LOW This will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, but additional fields should be strictly tied to validated business requirements.

Low-Medium

Extend an existing table (e.g., incident) in scope with some scripting

LOW-MEDIUM This will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, but additional fields should be strictly tied to validated business requirements. Complexity is dependent on the extent of the scripting.

Medium

Extend an existing table (e.g., incident) as the basis for a different application (e.g., HR)

LOW-MEDIUM This will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, but additional fields should be strictly tied to validated business requirements. For new applications, this should be preceded by clear process mapping and acceptance testing among knowledgeable users (e.g., HR process owners).

Medium

Use the incident table as is for a different use (e.g., HR)

LOW This will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, but use of the incident table outside its intended use case (e.g., ITSM) should be preceded by clear process mapping and acceptance testing among knolwedgable users (e.g., HR process owners).

Medium

Change the state choice list (e.g., modify the incident process)

LOW-MEDIUM This may affect time to upgrade or new functionality if modification changes underlying business logic, rules, and/or policies.

Medium

Build a new scoped application

MEDIUM this will typically not delay upgrades or new functionality, but scoped applications should be strictly tied to validated business requirements. Complexity is dependent on the extent of scripting.

Medium

Build a new global application MEDIUM-HIGH This may affect time to upgrade due to testing or new functionality if application changes underlie business logic, rules, and/or policies.

Critical

Change baseline business rules (e.g., modify the SLA process)

HIGH This may affect time to upgrade due to testing or new functionality.

Critical/Mandatory

Build complex custom integration

HIGH (DEPENDENT ON COMPLEXITY OF INTEGRATION) This may affect time to upgrade due to testing or new functionality.

Critical/Mandatory

Figure 1: Scoring common customization scenarios by complexity and value

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What about existing customizations?

The steps listed here can help make a clear cost-benefit analysis for new configurations and custom applications. But what about existing configurations and customizations?

As part of the system upgrade process, ServiceNow provides customers the ability to run an automated inventory of changes made to out-of-the-box scripting and configuration. To prevent customizations from being overwritten during system upgrades, the upgrade process skips (does not apply the update to) objects that have been customized. Upgrade Monitor can be used to list all updates skipped during the upgrade process to assist in resolving customizations that need review.

Skipped records (including changes to hard-coded records sys_ui_form_section, sys_ui_related_list, and sys_choice_set; and changes to tables that have at least one field of type HTML, XML, script, or script_plain) are flagged with a priority score reflecting their potential need for remediation for an upgrade. Any of the customization scenarios outlined in Figure 1 will likely be associated with multiple skipped records. As such, customers with existing customizations can:

• Generate a list of skipped records and their priority scores.

• Conduct an analysis to group and associate relevant skipped records with a specific customization (for example, extending an existing table in scope). You may be able to look to update sets and scoped applications for documentation on why a specific record was customized.

• Evaluate the customization in terms of its total cost and benefit, and determine if any remediation is necessary at the level of individual skipped records.

Refer to our guide on the process to review and address skipped changes for additional details.

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Changing out-of-the-box business rules – A note of caution

Business rules can be changed to perform several actions, including preventing users from accessing or modifying certain fields on a form, displaying information messages to the user, or changing field values on a form that the user is updating. Changes to business rules in ServiceNow can be complex and should adhere to the following best practices:

• Prevent recursive business rules – Avoid using current.update() in a business rule script. The update() method triggers business rules to run on the same table for insert and update operations, leading to a business rule calling itself over and over, causing system performance issues. You can prevent recursive business rules by using the setWorkflow() method with the false parameter.

• Where possible, stay small and specific – Ideally, changes to business rules should remain limited. Big business rule changes should come with strong business justification, given their potential complexity.

Additionally, in the past, the best practice strategy for updating baseline script was to make a copy of the record you want to update, make the original record inactive, and change the script in the copy. This complicated the upgrade process since there were two records to maintain for each change. Instead, the new best practice from ServiceNow is to modify the baseline record itself. The record will be available for review and revert as a skipped file during upgrade.

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Step 3: Tally your score to determine cost vs. value

While perfect cost-benefit analysis is nearly impossible, this scoring system should give you a consistent, objective, and easily explained means to determine whether configuration or a custom application is worth its potential cost.

In smaller or more centralized organizations, your core ServiceNow team can administer this scoring. Size the level of effort required by:

• The total volume of demand you anticipate for configurations and custom applications

• A rough estimate of the time required to assess each of the potential scenarios listed in Figure 1

One customer interview suggested that an evaluation of individual custom applications may require several hours per application, depending on the complexity of both workflows and data requirements. This may vary by organization or an application’s complexity, but some initial sampling can help to develop a baseline time estimate.

Simpler configurations, like field additions, may require less scrutiny, or you can evaluate them based on inferences you draw from data (like usage data) and/or interviews with power users. Keep process owners central to this evaluation to help determine whether customization is improving or detracting from process efficiency and effectiveness.

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Integrations and customization

Customers engaged in enterprise services transformation will see more demands for cross-platform integration, but this doesn’t necessarily have to lead to complex, customized integration. ServiceNow’s IntegrationHub reduces the need for complex, custom-coded integrations by enabling execution of third-party REST APIs as part of a workflow when a specific event occurs in ServiceNow. IntegrationHub supports three use cases, reducing the need for custom code:

• Third-party REST API integrations – Customers can post messages and ServiceNow incident, problem, and change record details to collaboration channels like HipChat, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.

• Integrations between ServiceNow instances – IntegrationHub provides an easy-to-configure spoke allowing for data synchronization across multiple ServiceNow instances.

• Create REST actions – IntegrationHub supports the development of custom REST web service actions to support API development for web-based applications.

In more complex or decentralized organizations, your team may include multiple platform owners/administrators who complete the evaluation process. In this case, a globally consistent scoring mechanism is critical to avoid major differences in customization levels across business units or functions. You’ll want to ensure that different business lines, regions, and teams use a consistent definition and evaluation process for “business-smart customization,” to avoid disrupting global workflows and data exchange.

Keep in mind that this assessment isn’t a one-time endeavor! It should be core to your ongoing ServiceNow governance and similar or consistent with your broader approach for IT change management, especially as you evaluate the level of effort needed to implement each new ServiceNow upgrade.

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Use ServiceNow HealthScan to monitor upgradability

ServiceNow HealthScan is a no-charge tool that helps you better understand and improve your instance health. Built on best practice definitions from thousands of instances, it quickly scans your ServiceNow platform and provides data points across five key categories: security, upgrades, performance, ease of management, and user experience. Findings are broken down by product suite, helping you understand where you may potentially have technical debt. It identiies customizations and configurations and provides you with data points to guide you on improving your instance and ranks those recommendations by importance. This hleps you identify unnecessary customizations and configurations so you can go back to out-of-the-box functionality.

Work with your account team to review HealthScan Scorecard Dashboard for your instance. For more details, the ServiceNow Configuration Review, conducted by a trained ServiceNow consultant, is also available.

You can also reassess the value of specific custom applications or configurations relative to the new capabilities available in an upgrade. In many cases, new functionality may satisfy the original customization use case, making removal an option.

EXPERT TIP Use simple scoring mechanisms to frame the cost benefit of common customization scenarios, and use this evaluation as a means to evaluate and prioritize business demands for customization.

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Should we evaluate every configuration and custom application?

For larger organizations, it may not be feasible or economical to run a line-by-line review of every configuration and custom application, especially if this includes an evaluation of legacy configurations or applications. In these cases, you have two options:

• Restrict evaluation to the riskiest points of customization – Using a list of common customization objectives (like those in Figure 1, you can elect to review only custom applications characterized by medium or high complexity or with known points of overconfiguration. The challenge with this approach, however, is that it could leave a number of safe—but legacy—configurations in place, regardless of their value.

• Use a zero-baseline process – You can elect to remove any configuration or custom applications that don’t have a clear, validated demand from a process or workflow owner (with the exception of the configurations required for regulatory or compliance purposes). Alternatively, you can also allow individual business lines or distributed teams to implement configurations and/or custom applications as needed—as long as they adhere to appropriate development and governance guidelines. (See Steps 2 and 3 for more on this.)

The challenge with removing legacy points of customization, however, is it that it requires strong organizational change management for process users (e.g., service desk personnel) whose workflows and behaviors may have adapted to legacy configurations and custom applications.

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Stage 2 – Establish governance Poor, inconsistent governance is a key root cause of excessive customization. To ensure responsiveness to demand while perserving global platform stability, create a governance model that balances oversight of global standards and policies with front-line management of local or scoped demands.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Effective governance requires both effective demand management and adherence to technology best practices.

• Establish a central, platform-level governance and empower local development teams to address demand for customization while avoiding risks to global platform stability.

Balance centralized governance with informed decision-making locally Demand for customization presents a dilemma: Highly centralized, command-and-control approaches to governance can create frustration for business lines awaiting their “turn in the backlog,” or can even lead teams to pursue custom solutions outside governance guidelines.

A central governance board that operates at ServiceNow platform level puts the guardrails in place to ensure that project teams implement ServiceNow customization only when there is explicit, defined business value that outweighs potential cost. This should not hinder the platform team’s ability to respond to demands for customization—especially as more lines of business or functions adopt ServiceNow.

In complex organizations with multiple lines of business, we recommend a federated, or distributed, decision-making model for customization governance. In this model, the central governance team:

• Maintains oversight, review, and approval authority over any global or shared objects (such as a global custom application)

• Defines recommended standards for configuration and development of scoped applications

Note: For details on the central governance team, refer to our Success Checklist on how to build a dedicated, dynamic governance process, policies, and team.

Teams within individual lines of business, regions, or functions manage their own demand pipelines within their scoped environments.

See the model depicted in Figure 2 for a deeper understanding of the division between the global and local responsibilities for customization demand management.

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Figure 2: A federated model for manage demand for customization

It’s important to push some decision-making to the front lines of demand, so customization and configuration are both responsive and tailored to a local business need. Scoped applications, and the other tools and methods you’ll read about in Step 3, give individual lines of business, regions, or teams the freedom and flexibility to develop custom applications and configurations locally—without risking global platform stability.

Local development teams must comply with the demand management and design mechanisms created at the central level, including decisions that:

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• Have been approved by a governing body nearly 100% of the time • Are low risk, or have limited potential for negative impact and comply with published

standards (for example, governance decisions on pilots or other experimental projects in testing environments)

At the same time, global governance functions should provide decision-making guardrails, rather than clear lines of authority—this allows a balance of risk taking and risk remediation. Guardrails should be defined for decisions that cannot yet be made autonomously but that are trending in that direction. Also, communicate best practices for local or scoped development and configuration, and develop a crossorganization community of practice to share best practices for development and governance.

Establish a central, platform-level demand board For global applications, establish a demand board to ensure that the proposals adhere to the explicitly defined criteria for business value. (At least initially, a change advisory board, or CAB, can do this in lieu of a demand board.) The demand board should meet at least monthly (or as needed) to accept, intercept, vet, and prioritize new demands submitted by process owners, business partners, and others.

Recommended demand board staffing

• Now Platform owner – This person leads and oversees the platform support team, ensures the team’s work aligns with the business strategy and the ServiceNow roadmap, and participates actively in the overarching governance of the platform.

• Now Platform architect – This architect assures the platform aligns with the business strategy and governance decisions. The architect documents the platform, analyzes the impacts of new requirements, and provides controls to make sure that business solutions are delivered using the correct technical solutions.

• Demand owner(s) — Demand owners manage the day-to-day activities of the demand management process, drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the process, and gather reports on process metrics.

• Business relationship managers — These managers maintain a positive relationship with customers, identifying customer needs and ensuring that the service provider is able to meet these needs with an appropriate catalog of services.

At a minimum, participants involved in demand screening should have sufficient business and technical knowledge to assess the relative business value of a global requirement, the cost of its implementation and support, and its potential technical risks.

Use the scoring criteria from Stage 1 to evaluate common customization scenarios as a “first pass” assessment for new global requests.

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Demand screening at both the central and local levels should be supported by consistent development requirements and a management process, ideally overseen by a business analyst, with explicit prioritization criteria defined by business and technical leads. Articulate individual requirements in terms of user stories to reach an explicit definition of business value as described in Stage 1. Table 2 provides an example of a user story applied to ServiceNow.

USER NEED OBJECTIVE

As an HR service consumer... ...I need the ability to add comments to onboarding activities for mydirect reports...

...to ensure that process users are aware of the nonstandard requirements for our team.

As an ITSM service fulfiIler... ...I need the ability to configure fields in our change request forms...

...to meet local compliance and auditing requirements.

As an ITOM developer... ...I need the ability to grant access rights to service maps to enterprise service managers...

...to facilitate a review of redundancy levels as part of our business continuity planning.

Table 2: User story development model for ServiceNow

Build effective design guidelines for custom applications

Your demand board should be supported by a design authority, such as a design board or architectural review board (ARB), that provides guidance on how to develop global and scoped applications. Ideally, your design board should be in place when the build activities begin (or earlier) to ensure consistency, efficiency, and quality for the solution. ServiceNow highly recommends that local development teams stay within their scoped enviornment to ensure they don’t break any existing applications.

Recommended design board staffing

• Application architect

• Development lead

• User interface and experience subject matter expert (SME)

A global design board can identify and evangelize best practices for configuration and custom application development at a line-of-business, regional, or functional level without necessarily stepping in as a “policing” function. The pipeline depicted in Figure 3, below, shows the role of both demand and design boards in vetting global customization demands.

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Clearly defined architectural and technical standards for developing custom applications are at the heart of design guidance and best practices. Effective governance should define architectural and technical standards for mechanisms and tools to develop custom applications.

These standards and policies should be reviewed with each ServiceNow release and proactively shared with service developers and process users with each upgrade. Ideally, these should be consistently promoted across business units, functions, or multiple instances to ensure global consistency in workflow and data management. The central governance team should also institute a quarterly “health check” to identify whether any custom applications are creating challenges to performance.

Figure 3: The demand to deploy pipeline for global custom application requests

These four steps correlate directly with Figure 3:

1. Ideas are submitted by qualified individuals, like process owners, practitioners, and business partners.

2. The demand board accepts, intercepts, vets, and prioritizes the inbound demand. Ultimately, “demand shaping” will become a priority for the demand board. The tools it uses include the ServiceNow roadmap as well as estimation, value, and benefits realization.

3. The design board may engage when the build activities begin (or earlier) to ensure the solution’s consistency, efficiency, and quality. The design board may engage the portfolio management office at this point to oversee the project’s activities and supply a project manager, sales manager, or business admin, or other shared resources. The design board uses development standards, best fit usage, UI standards, and data governance and strategy as its tools.

4. The platform support team will also engage at this point to deliver on the approved prioritized demand. This team uses release best practices to drive delivery.

For additional details, refer to our Success Playbook on how to manage platform demand.

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Additional governance considerations To be effective, governance cannot rely solely on assigned responsibilities and authorities. The central governance team should promote the right information resources to build organization-wide awareness of smart customization practices.

These resources include:

• A well-defined and well-communicated roadmap that makes service consumers aware of planned upgrades and customizations to avoid redundant requests

• Explicit criteria that can help service consumers plan and build a business case for customization

• Technical standards and best practices (such as those for development of custom applications) that optimize throughput, consistency, and quality

• Technology channels that standardize how you capture requirements and ensure the effective routing of requirements (or questions) to ServiceNow experts

Second, your governance structures—no matter how you define them—should have the authority to establish incentives that promote good customization. Creating organization-wide awareness of good customization practices can involve assigning penalties for unauthorized global customizations as well as positive measures, like rewards or recognition for adherence to standards or the establishment of a community of practice to promote and share best practices.

Third, governance should include measurements and their corresponding metrics to evaluate governance effectiveness.

METRIC MEASUREMENT

Percentage of global configurations and applications associated with a clear and documented business case

Measures the demand board’s effectiveness in vetting customization requirements for business value

Percentage of global custom applications that meet with technical standards

Measures the design board’s effectiveness in enforcing technical standards for customization

Percentage of global custom applications with approved exceptions to technical standards

Measures the extent the design or architectural review board should reassess the technical standards in response to changes in demand

Table 3: Measurements and corresponding metrics for evaluating governance

When you regularly assess your organization’s overall level of customization, you can locate unapproved customizations or identify whether review and approval processes should be more stringent to ensure business-smart customization practices.

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EXPERT TIP At the global level, design boards can promote consistent standards and best practices for responding to demands for customization at the local level.

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Stage 3 – Define the development model ServiceNow offers several technical options to meet demands for customization and avoid negative effects on platform stability and upgrade timelines. Scoped applications and other resources allow you to safely accommodate complex business demands without sacrificing speed of delivery or performance.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Use scoped applications to build custom apps and limit your use of domain separation to a narrow set of use cases.

• Use delegated development and source control to manage distributed development.

Provide design guidance to your teams Give your local teams, regions, or lines of business design guidance on how to use ServiceNow capabilities to respond to customization demands. Be sure to include guidance on:

• Mechanisms – Promote using scoped applications to build custom apps in restricted or encapsulated environments. Use domain separation when specific use cases mandate that you isolate data between entities.

• Tools – Promote using delegated development, update sets, and source control to ensure consistency in custom app development.

Build scoped applications to reduce complexity Custom applications in ServiceNow should be built in scope, because it ensures that an application has boundaries that:

• Allow the system to uniquely identify application artifacts, like tables, properties, user roles, and public and private API definitions

• Encapsulate the runtime code

• Provide table-level data access control

Application scoping protects applications by identifying and restricting access to application files and data. By default, all custom applications have a private scope that uniquely identifies them and their associated artifacts with a namespace identifier.

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A scoped application can access and change its own tables and business logic, while other applications cannot without explicit permission. This ensures custom apps do not interrupt core business services and that other applications do not interfere with a custom application’s normal functioning.

Scoped applications cannot access the privately marked artifacts of a different application in global scope, and they should be used for building new standalone apps. When you evaluate retained customizations, you should identify whether you can convert any of your global apps to scoped apps to reduce system complexity. Figure 4 outlines decision criteria for determining when global applications should be converted to scoped applications.

Learn more about the APIs in Figure 4’s decision tree on the ServiceNow developers page.

Converting retained global apps to scoped apps

For global apps you need to convert to scoped apps, the project team should:

1. Create a copy of the application on another instance (made easier if the organization elects to stand up a new instance to remove or remediate customization, as defined in Stage 2).

2. Create new scope.

3. Copy the artifacts in scope.

4. Deactivate the artifacts in global scope.

Be sure you use scoped applications where possible to reduce complexity and maintain a controlled, distributed development.

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Figure 4: Deciding between global and scoped applications

For additional details on building custom scoped applications, refer to our Success Playbook: Manage application development on the Now Platform.

Customization and domain separation Organizations typically implement domain separation for one of these two reasons:

• The ServiceNow implementation is overseen by managed service providers.

• The implementation spans multiple, independent legal entities.

With domain separation, you can separate ServiceNow data, processes, and administrative tasks into logically defined domains. You can share some global properties, data, and processes

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across all domains, but individual domains may have customized process definitions (and associated rules and policies) and user interfaces.

Most commonly, domain separation is implemented for managed service providers required to isolate data between legally separate entities. Domain separation should not be used as a method for containing complex customizations, except with the narrow use cases defined in Table 3.

In an implementation with a domain separation model, businesssmart customization should include a review of the customization built into both global scope and individual domains.

Table 3: Use cases for domain separation

Manage your custom application’s development and release Larger or more complex organizations—especially those using multiple production instances—present some risk of inconsistency when implementing or maintaining customization best practices due to lapses in governance or failure to use available tools. ServiceNow offers several options to ensure consistent and efficient implementation of custom applications within and across instances.

Use delegated development to support a distributed/decentralized implementation Delegated development will help you balance scalability and maintain control over customization. It also allows non-administrators to develop scoped applications on the Now Platform. (Note that delegated developers can work only on scoped applications, not on global applications, and do not have access to any global artifacts.)

For each application, administrators can:

• Grant non-admin users the ability to develop applications

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• Specify which application file types the developer can access

• Grant the developer access to security records and script fields

• Remove a user or group as a developer

Especially in a more decentralized organization (or an organization with multiple lines of business), delegated development lets ServiceNow administrators maintain effective governance and control over customization without compromising scalability. Delegated developers can build scoped applications, but ServiceNow administrators can reserve review and publication rights. Note: this will no longer be the case in the London and future releases.

Additionally, developer permissions are application-specific, so ServiceNow administrators set permissions for each application. A developer who, for example, has permission to access file types for one application does not necessarily have any permissions for another application.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

delegated_developer The user has one or more developer permissions.

Roles that start with an sn_dd prefix The user has an application-specific developer permission. The role name indicates the scope it applies to.

Table 4: Delegated developer roles

Use source control to support consistency in development Source control lets developers integrate with a GIT source control repository to save and manage multiple versions of a scoped application from a sub-production instance. You can use source control to share apps across development instances while ensuring each instance remains independent. Developers use separate instances to work on different features, applications, or product releases at the same time, but they can share code between these instances and resolve collisions throughout the development process. Source control allows for more distributed development while ensuring the changes are effectively managed in development.

Use update sets to store customized changes across applications An update set is a group of customizations you can move from one instance to another when you publish global applications only.

You can also use update sets to:

• Store changes to a baseline or installed application

• Store and apply a particular version of an application

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• Deploy changes to installed applications across multiple instances

Keep in mind that you should not use update sets to install scoped applications across instances. Instead, publish scoped applications to the application repository.

While you can use update sets to govern the deployment of a uniform set of changes or customizations to installed applications across instances, source control can be used to share or install custom applications across instances—and allow for more distributed development.

Planning the update set process

1. Ensure that both instances are the same version.

2. Determine the customizations to make in a single update set.

3. Ensure all the base system records have matching sys_id fields.

4. Identify a common path for update sets to move across instances and maintain that model.

5. Plan when you will commit the update set to production.

6. Make sure update set names are clear.

7. Ensure you understand how update sets work.

8. Before you make any customizations, double-check that you selected the correct update set.

Use the application repository Use the application repository to install custom applications across instances or when you want to deploy completed applications to end users. You can also use it to manage update sets automatically so any updates made across instances are made to the latest application version only.

Table 5 brings together a single-page view of definitions for recommended development mechanisms, management tools, and deployment methods. Governance bodies like the design board can use this as a starting point to communicate recommended development standards to the local level.

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RECOMMENDED MECHANISM FOR CUSTOM APPLICATIONS

Build scoped applications

TOOLS FOR MANAGING DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT

Delegated development

To grant non-admin users the ability to develop applications without compromising governance

Source control

To avoid collision in distributed development

DEPLOYMENT METHODS

Update sets

Store changes that can be deployed across instances; used to deploy global apps

Application repository

Deploy scoped apps

Table 5: Development mechanisms, tools for managing distributed development, and deployment methods

Testing Custom applications, whether scoped or global, should not be deployed without a comprehensive test plan for functionality and integrations (where applicable). You should test both before deployment as well as before and after an instance upgrade to evaluate any effects an upgrade may have on a custom application, particularly for global applications. Your testing should rely on a set of detailed test scripts you use consistently to evaluate functionality.

With the ServiceNow Automated Testing Framework, ServiceNow administrators as well as application creators can build tests for new custom applications with little or no scripting to ensure that individual custom applications can work effectively within the instance. Your governance guidelines for customization should include directions for testing using the Automated Testing Framework, as applicable, or alternatives.

After upgrading, testers should track any defects or deviations from the pre-upgrade testing results for a custom application. Defect tracking can help identify root causes and create fixes. When a fix is identified, capture the fix in a single update set. The resulting update sets hold the cumulative fixes you should apply to the production instance.

EXPERT TIP Promote a consistent view of best practices for development across a federated governance model.

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Stage 4 – Learn customization demands Business-smart customization should add, not detract, from user’s service experience. Identify where customization can and should impact user experience and satisfaction at key points in the workflow, and involve process users in defining business-smart customization.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Look for the relationship between customization demands and users’ “moments of truth,” where experience and satisfaction is most strongly shaped.

• Focus disproportionately on process users, and involve them in defining business-smart customization.

Look for “moments of truth” in service experience When you evaluate custom applications or configurations, look for the relationship between customization and moments of truth—those places in the user’s workflow where their service experience and satisfaction is most strongly shaped. Customization that doesn’t add to experience and satisfaction at these points (or, worse, detracts from experience and satisfaction) may not be worth keeping, especially if the proposed configuration or custom application does not deliver additional business value.

Focus first on process users

Evaluations of service experience should disproportionately focus on process users (for example, service desk staff), given the amount of time they spend within ServiceNow on a day-to-day basis. Configurations or custom applications can significantly change how they perform their jobs, so support for (or resistance to) change is likely to be strongest among this group. A focus on process users should:

• Involve learning how they currently use existing configurations and custom applications. Process users have often developed or adapted behaviors (or resorted to workarounds) as the Now Platform has evolved, for reasons that may not be clear unless you ask. This can prompt a discussion around the ideal extent of customization required for process users to be effective—and which “moments of truth” in a workflow have the greatest impact on their experience and satisfaction.

• Involve them in the development of business-smart customization guidelines. Process users can help to frame your evaluation process for new configurations and custom applications

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and can help developers define and promote recommended configuration and/or development standards. This creates a sense of ownership that promotes business-smart customization as a clearly understood set of organizational practices.

Deep, personalized engagement—led by a business analyst or business relationship manager—should focus on process users who are highly influential among their peers and can play key roles in defining customization requirements and driving adoption.

Surface experience requirements at service consumer interactions Evaluations of customization demands should include an identification of moments of truth where a new configuration or custom application changes a point of interaction with a service consumer.

Where this is most likely to occur is in the Service Catalog and Service Portal, given the volume of service consumers that interact with these capabilities. Customization should not just look to serve a business demand but also focus on improving ease of navigation (for example, through collapsible menus) and process transparency (for example, in tracking requests). The effectiveness of a new configuration or custom application at a point of interaction should be measured by the effects it has on adoption—customization that is suspected of negatively impacting adoption should be reviewed, regardless of the original business case.

If a backlog of experience requirements for service consumers is unavailable, you can use several scalable techniques to identify and understand moments of truth, including surveys, focus groups of power users, user acceptance testing, and even design contests.

EXPERT TIP Ensure customization delivers on service experience requirements at points of consumer interaction, like the Service Catalog and Service Portal.

Related resources • Success Checklist – Manage to out of the box • Success Quick Answer – What are the best practices for customization? • Success Template – Configuration control board charter • Success Template – Configuration management roles and responsibilities

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