The Service Release Package (SRP) is a new form in ServiceNow that is the recommended tool to record all Service Transition and Release activity, up to and including Early Life Support.
Who is it for?
Anyone involved in releasing new services or significant changes to existing services. You can use the SRP for anything from a small team project to a programme of work.
How does it work?
You can find a list of all SRPs by navigating to Service Design and Transition –> Service Release Packages (SRP) or by searching for SRP in the left-hand menu.
Andy is running a Lunch and Learn on the Service Release Package on Thursday 18 June; this session will be recorded, and will be available in the Lunch and Learns channel within the IT Services Collaboration Space.
For more information on how to use the SRP please see KB14796 – SRP: an overview of the Service Release Package or talk to Andy Ferguson in the Service Management Team.
When can I use it?
If you’re already using the Release Checklist for a project, you can continue using that – but if you want to convert to an SRP then let us know.
We’ll work with other projects as they enter the transition phase to guide them through using the new form, but please feel free to start using it now.
New features
- You can now record testing progress for each type of test recorded in the Service Design Package (SDP), and upload test completion reports when testing is complete.
- You can link through to external sites – for example, Sharepoint – from the SRP form, as well as attaching documents as before.
- There’s a new Early Life Support (ELS) field so you can report on what stage of ELS each service is at, and which ones have successfully exited ELS.
- There are new fields to record training and knowledge transfer progress – and to report on projects where there’s no training required.
- You can now link to Knowledge Base (KB) articles related to Service Introduction.
- Business Owners can now authorise a release through a new Service Catalogue item – but there’s also a field to let the release coordinator do this, if necessary.
- There are scheduled reports on the status of all projects in the release phase, which can be used for the Project Advisory Committee (PAC).
- New KB articles explaining how to use each feature – with links to the KB on the relevant screen in the SRP.
- You can now link releases to a parent project or programme of work.
- You can keep using your existing Release Checklist for now, whilst still being able to fill in a skeleton SRP without running into issues with mandatory fields.
- There are dashboards for release coordinators to keep track of the status of all their releases.
- There’s a stripped down version of the form to use for Team Projects.
Proposed features
Development of further features is already underway. Additional functionality we are considering includes:
- Project size field – to record if a project is small/medium/large. The smaller the project the less fields will be on the form.
- Functionality that removes some infrastructure options from the form when a service is 100% cloud hosted.
If there are further features you would like us to look at, please log them as Enhancement Requests to the ServiceNow Developers (B-Team).