Change Management | Milic Media

Sep 17, 2026 Change Management

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.

Aug 18, 2026 Change Management

Change Management on ServiceNow Fails at the CAB, Not at the Form

An infrastructure lead at a European insurer called me last month with what he thought was a workflow problem. His team's change request form on ServiceNow had grown to sixty-two fields. The approval routing had eleven conditional branches. Emergency changes were sitting in the queue for two days waiting for a rubber-stamp signature. His CIO had asked him to fix the form. The form was not the problem. The form was the last place anyone looked for a problem that started in the change advisory board eighteen months earlier. This is the pattern I see in most mid-market change management ServiceNow deployments. The platform is doing exactly what it was configured to do. The configuration reflects a set of decisions the CAB made, or failed to make, over years of drift. And by the time someone escalates, the diagnosis has already been misdirected at the tool.

Jun 30, 2026 Change Management

Change Management on ServiceNow: Why CAB Discipline Is the Number You Should Be Watching

A platform owner at a mid-market insurer called me last month, frustrated. Her change failure rate had crept from a respectable 4 percent up to 11 percent over two quarters. Her CAB met every Tuesday at 11am, fifteen people on the call, agenda stuffed with thirty to forty changes, most of them rubber-stamped in ninety seconds each. She wanted to know if there was a feature in ServiceNow she had missed. Some smart workflow, some AI risk-scoring add-on, something the platform could do that her team was not using. There was, of course. But the feature was not the problem. The problem was that her CAB had stopped being a control and started being a ceremony. Every implementation I have ever audited that produced creeping change failure rates had the same underlying issue, and it was almost never a missing module. It was discipline. Change management on ServiceNow works exactly as well as the human process you wrap around it, and most mid-market organisations have let that human process rot quietly while they kept upgrading the platform.