Change management is a well-structured approach that enables leaders of an enterprise to guide the business through change with minimal disruption and consequences. The end objective of this process could be to change the organization, but what drives this exercise is the ability to successfully lead resources and functions in the journey. Businesses strive to adapt and change to increase profit margins and remain competitive.
Two years ago, Facebook suffered an outage that caused a momentary fall in its share price and caused billions of dollars for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The cascading consequences were further catastrophic for those couple of hours. One main reason for this mishap was not automating the validation of a network change. Strategic preparedness/change management is critical for enterprises in managing complex networks driven by highly automated workflows for network configuration. What Facebook dealt with is just an example.
In a huge Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ecosystem, the applications deployed and how they collaborate for cross-functional efficiency determine the overall performance. While the choice of systems impacts the productivity of resources, seamless cross-functional collaboration helps the teams to obtain a fuller context of business objectives.
Powerful and intuitive applications like Azure DevOps and ServiceNow bring rich functionalities to a dynamic ecosystem. Therefore, by integrating these applications, enterprises can slowly diminish communication and collaboration barriers between critical functions like development and customer service. This is the first step in preparedness for change management. The absence of this can result in quality issues, delivery delays, and ultimately financial loss.
ServiceNow is a cloud-based IT Service Management (ITSM) platform that enables businesses to automate their IT processes and operations. On the other hand, Azure DevOps aids developers to enhance their software delivery, development, and planning processes. Azure DevOps is highly reliable and aids in the development of apps by tracking every step of this journey – initiatives, tasks, and solutions. Azure DevOps incorporates agile project planning, Git-based source code management, automated testing, and continuous integration benefitting any developer.
Both ServiceNow and Azure DevOps are applications that facilitate control over service requests and process automation to ensure that activities align with objectives. These form the foundation blocks of overall digital transformation while fortifying the efforts of businesses to adapt. ServiceNow and Azure DevOps need to communicate with one another to obtain automation benefits that lend businesses the much-needed competitive edge.
Delivery success is determined by many factors. One critical aspect is the degree of alignment between teams. This alignment can only be achieved and kept alive with an uninterrupted flow of information between various information systems. Integration of Azure DevOps and ServiceNow enables both platforms to work together to utilize the benefits of service desk and development teams.
ServiceNow is a leader in ITSM and is favored by many businesses that use Azure DevOps to schedule projects as well as to troubleshoot issues referred by the service desk. Even if Azure DevOps and ServiceNow are deployed separately in the IT architecture, they contribute to cutting-edge management, outcome-driven actions, and overall customer satisfaction. Hence integrating both platforms will ensure there is efficiency and streamlined workflows that result in accelerated product rollout.
Informed decision-making, transparent processes, and ensuring challenges are within control are some of the positive outcomes provided by both tools together as part of an organization’s IT toolkit.
In a DevOps ecosystem, it is essential to collaborate with the right applications for better management of incident and change management. These activities are key to DevOps processes. Integrating Azure Pipelines with ServiceNow Change Management enhances coordination between development and IT teams. ServiceNow Change Management extension for Azure DevOps supports process automation reducing the chances of manual errors and enhancing deployment agility.
With integration, developers can add an “update change request” to the deployment process in Azure and this is simultaneously updated as a change request in ServiceNow. This is also applicable for release information on the pipeline. It can automatically be captured in the change request for traceability, thereby, enabling a complete end-to-end integration between both platforms.
Azure DevOps and ServiceNow integration helps development and service teams obtain complete traceability of a particular requirement. Gemini Consulting & Services can help your enterprise integrate Azure DevOps with ServiceNow so that your business can obtain the full context of customer requirements and leverage the best functionality to deliver resolution. Contact us to know how in an integrated environment, businesses can deliver seamlessly, and adapt to changes with ease.
- Deep integration makes it possible to map dynamic change request types in ServiceNow Change Management templates like Standard, Normal, and Emergency based on the urgency of resolution. On the dynamic template, additional fields get populated as and when a change request is synced with ServiceNow. This, in turn, gets synced back to Azure DevOps. This enables teams to identify the nature of the request and its priority status.
- A change request from Azure DevOps also contains associated user stories and tasks in a tabular structure and provides complete visibility to ServiceNow users. This amplifies understanding of the impact of change and helps management teams make informed decisions using visualization.
- ServiceNow provides a change calendar that presents a real-time view of all the consolidated changes in an interactive timeline. Now this helps in the identification of conflicts in the schedule for the Azure team as well. In ServiceNow, it helps detect if the change request will impact any other associated change scheduled.
- It uses the ITIL framework and follows industry best practices to ensure there are no work disruptions. Processes are designed to centralize procedures while enacting a change and monitor it throughout its lifecycle and automate it entirely.
- It reduces the threat of change-induced incidents as well as enhances the quality of changes to achieve successful changes in the first go.
- Businesses obtain real-time access to customer issues.
- Prompt updates are shared on work items from the native systems themselves.
- Real-time updates of query resolution.
