Plan, prepare and execute complex, high-stakes cutovers with confidence.
Target Buyers
Programme directors, heads of change, and technology and risk leaders responsible for business-critical change. RBM is built for organisations where a failed cutover carries financial, operational, reputational and regulatory consequences, particularly in financial services.
Business Problem
Major cutovers, migrations and transformation go-lives are too large, too complex and too important to depend on spreadsheets, documents and manually coordinated teams. Most are still planned and run this way, creating problems at every stage of the cutover management lifecycle:
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Plan: Cutover plans are spread across multiple spreadsheets and documents, making ownership, dependencies, sequencing and change control difficult to manage.
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Prepare: Reviews and rehearsals are often inconsistent, so readiness is hard to prove and Go / No-Go decisions are harder to support.
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Run: Once execution starts, leaders need a shared view of progress, delays, issues and risks across every participating team, and rarely have one.
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Improve: Operational evidence and lessons learned are often lost, so avoidable problems recur in future major change events.
The same gaps affect service recovery and IT disaster recovery, where time-critical activities must be coordinated across many teams.
Solution
Runbook Management (RBM) brings the plan, readiness, live execution and evidence together in one governed application on ServiceNow. Programme directors use it to build trusted plans, prove cutover readiness, stay in control during execution and improve every future cutover.
Benefits
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Build trusted cutover plans: model complex plans, coordinate planning across teams and understand the impact of dependencies.
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Prove readiness: assess cutover readiness, check planning completeness and build the evidence needed for confident Go / No-Go decisions.
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Stay in control: coordinate live execution, track progress in real time and see issues alongside their impact on the cutover.
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Learn and improve: capture evidence throughout the cutover lifecycle and apply what you learn to the next one.
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Reduce outage risk: lower the risk of service outages caused by change, and restore services faster when incidents occur.
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Demonstrate compliance: meet operational resilience regulatory obligations with audit-ready evidence.
Value Proposition
RBM gives leadership confidence that business-critical change will land as planned, with the evidence to prove it. It can also reduce planning and execution manpower costs by up to 40%, and cut the frequency and duration of service outages, estimated to cost US$300,000 per hour.
Built on ServiceNow
RBM is built natively on ServiceNow, so it extends the platform customers have already invested in. Cutover plans sit alongside the change requests, incidents, risks and business services they affect, with no separate tool to integrate, secure or maintain.
Customer Proof
"We have used the original ICEFLO solution for almost a decade and it has transformed our cutover and DR experience. The new Runbook Management solution, delivered on the ServiceNow® platform, makes strategic sense, adds powerful functionality, eases wide-scale adoption and amplifies the benefits to our organisation."
Head of Service Delivery, Global Bank
Key Features
Plan
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Build large, complex runbooks with stages and tasks defined in detail
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Set dependencies between tasks
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Automatically calculate the critical path, duration and end time of a plan
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Import and export tasks
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Define teams and membership to control access and task assignment
Prepare
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Assess cutover readiness and check planning completeness
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Link change requests, incidents, risks and business services to events, instances, stages and tasks
Run
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Execute runbooks as events against a change window
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Let task owners update task status directly
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Raise and manage issues during execution
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Process every update in real time and recalculate the forecast end time
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Track progress and status through dashboards and visualisations
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Trigger automated communications from critical application events
Improve
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Capture detailed audit information across every event
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Retain evidence and lessons learned for future cutovers
RBM enables our customers to:
1. Create large, complex runbooks
2. Define stages and tasks in great detail
3. Build dependencies between tasks
4. Automatically compute the critical path, duration and end time of a plan
5. Execute Runbooks in Events against a Change Window
6. Define Teams and Membership for controlled access and assignment
7. Enable task owners to update the status of tasks
8. Enable issues to be raised and managed effectively
9. Dynamically process all updates and their impact on the forecast end time
10. Deliver key progress and status instrumentation, presented in dashboards and other visualisations
11. Deliver automated communications triggered by critical application events
12. Capture key information to provide forensically detailed audit information
13. Associate the following records with Events, Instances, Stages and Tasks
a) Change Requests
b) Incidents
c) Risks
d) Business Services
14. Allow Import and Export of Tasks
This release includes the following enhancements or fixes to existing features:
Improvements
- Master Event and Runbook selection for subset cloning
- Addition of Categories to support Workstream and Domain referencing on tasks
- Decisions Recording, including addition of Governance Tiers
- Task Types, to differentiate usage of tasks and outcomes
- Lock/Unlock an Event
Various fixes (including)
- Various enhancements made to Export/Import to ensure correct data is delivered.
- Columns have been aligned on a Planner View export to enable re-import into a
Runbook - Runbook Activate button was appearing in the event that a Backout was invoked
The ServiceNow ITSM solution must be licensed on the Customer instance. This is because the RBM solution associates runbook instances and tasks with Change, Incident and Risk information held in the ITSM solution.
Other Requirements:None