Change Management on ServiceNow: Why Your CAB Discipline Is Quietly Wrecking Your Change Failure Rate
A platform lead at a European insurer asked me last month to look at their change process on ServiceNow. Their board had just been shown a slide with a 14 percent change failure rate and the CIO wanted to know whether it was a tooling problem or a people problem. He was hoping for tooling, because tooling is buyable. I spent two days pulling change records, listening in on a CAB, and sitting with the Change team. The tool was fine. The CAB was theatre. Every Wednesday at 15:00 a room of twelve people spent ninety minutes rubber-stamping fifty-plus normal changes, arguing about two of them, and running out of time before the standard change catalogue was even mentioned. Nobody was reading the change records before the meeting. The risk score was cargo-culted from the template. The implementation plans were three sentences long. The failure rate had nothing to do with the platform. It had everything to do with the fact that change management servicenow had become a compliance ritual instead of a control.
