hi everyone this is Jason from ServiceNow in this short video I'm just going to show you a little demonstration about change approval policies this is a new feature that was introduced in Madrid some months ago earlier this year and not everyone is have seen this before so I thought this give me a little demonstration about how this works because previously prior to Madrid change approval policies worked slightly differently so if we go to the workflow editor in service now and we'll just take a look at the change request normal policy here in previous versions of ServiceNow we had an activity right here that was basically just a regular group approval that we saw here one of these activity types approval group we're in for a normal change requests it would be a technical approval for the first approval and in the second one it would be a cab approval but instead from Madrid we've got this one here now called change approval policy this is actually a new activity type that was introduced in ServiceNow in the Madrid version so if you go to your list of activities here you'll see a new category here called change policy now there's only one in there when I clip it in there and this is the one that we're actually looking at here now just see what's going on inside here basically it is just a reference to an approval policy here so actually going to take a look at these approval policies in just a second basically it just gives you a lot more flexibility and makes a lot easier to implement different kinds of approval policies and procedures for different kinds of change requests without having to encapsulate all of this in a regular approval activity in your workflow we also have a field here called a policy input now at the moment don't have anything in here but we could actually use this to reference other fields or other labels that we specify in our change policies which we'll see in just a minute yeah but anyway let's take a look at this change this mom will change policy right now and see what's going on there so basically the deal is is that when the workflow comes to the assessed state here for the first round of approve we'll see no change requests it's gonna kick start this change approval policy which is then going to call this normal change policy right here so let's go ahead and open up that policy here so if we go to change change approval policies yeah since it's completely new in the matured version of ServiceNow well actually if I just remove those few letters there and if we go down to the change policy here we've actually got two modules here change approval policies and so called approval definitions so let's have a look at change approval policies first as a name suggests they're basically policies or procedures or rules in which that you create to determine who needs to or what will trigger an approval under what conditions do we need to have an approval at which state or the workflow what kinds of workflows need to have an approval these are basically our triggers you could say so if we open up this one here that was a reference in the workflow that we just came from normal change policy and have a look at that one we'll see here basically this policy is governed by two related lists here once called policy inputs and the other one is called decisions if we look at policy inputs this is basically the oil conditions when are we going to trigger a particular kind of decision that we reference here so at the moment we've just got two here now every time you create a new policy input or a new approval policy rather you'll always have access to this so called change request table here so if we open up that all we're saying is that this is a reference to actually the change request record and this is kind of a variable that we can call later in our decisions which we'll have a look at in just a minute so we go back and let's have a look at this second one and this one's a little bit unusual here because if we look at it he said so it's kind of like a true/false field and we just given it the name manager approval and then it's a manager approved rather in the call name we've got manager approved here it's some of you may be wondering what's going on there basically that is just a variable that we've created here that we can reference in a script in our change policy action in the workflow so what we're actually doing we're not actually using this right now we're actually just creating a variable for it so if we come to the decision related list now and if we have a look at the one for assess technical approvals because often best just to explain these things with these of examples so this is basically our first level or our first year approval that we have in our normal change request so whenever you get an instance of service now a developer instance a brand new instance of ServiceNow you'll have some standard workflows for change requests there's one for a normal change of question this one as many of you will know who has a 2-step approval process one is your technical approval which is this one that we see here right now and the other one is the cab approval so instead of having the assignment group for the change requests referenced in the workflow activity and we've actually got it here so we're basically saying when the change request state is assess we are going to use or use this approval definition right here and this aunt so called answer here this approval definition is this one right over here approval definition okay which would take a look at in just a minute okay so in other words this is basically our first step in the approval process but before we take a look at that approval definition if we just go back and have a look at their cab approval decision here well see it looks a little bit different are basically just saying when the change request state is authorized and in that situation we are going to use a different approval definition the so-called cab approval definition again referenced in this module over here so let's take a look at these approval definitions and see what's going on there let's have a look at the assignment group approval that we use for their first approval so basically we've got a situation here where we've got well where where we can define what kind of approval we want to have and here we've got a few different options we can just flat-out approve and reject these change requests so we could have different conditions there for the change requests for different kinds of change requests for different kinds of configuration item classes or whatever and then we could just have an automatic approval otherwise we could have a user or a group approval like we've got here and here we've got an approval source this approval source is the change request at the moment so in other words we're looking for a field in that change request record that is going to be improved to send it to and this field in our case is going to be this I'm a group and we're just going to wait for the first person to respond to that to either approve or reject that change request otherwise if we select here approval definition then we can just specify some other kind of group outside of anything that's recorded in that change request but you'll see here already that you can actually do quite a few things here that's in the previous approval group workflow activity for change requests you would have had the script so things like percentage of users you know which is quite a common use case that lots of our customers have to do that you would have had to script that in a workflow approval activity but here we can just say percentage of users and we could just say as when a majority approve approves 51% or whatever then we go ahead otherwise we could just say when 1% approves if we have 100 users in the group then we only need one person approving that or rejecting it for that to be considered a valid approval or rejection so yeah that's basically how these new change policies work in ServiceNow so basically we start with a change approval policy we set conditions for when we want to trigger an approval and those approval policies then reference a so called approval definition which is what we've got right here so rather than if I go back to the workflow editor defining all of this in an approval workflow activity like we used to prior to Madrid we've now moved that approval into these two different tables here or these two modules to change approval policies just leave that change approval policies where we have our triggers or our variables that we can define and then in our decisions but maybe while I'm here if I just open that assess technical approvals what we could also do here and this is where these variables that we just saw come into play well I add another condition here I've got basically two options really I can reference something that's in the change request that was actually one of those so-called variables that we defined before so at the moment it's not really I can't really do anything I can specify a change request but what I need to do is come down to show related fields and then specify some kind of field in that particular change request for example I reference the configuration item and from there I could look at the configuration item class or whatever that's one option the other option is to if I just come down here and remove those related fields and get back to what we originally had is to go to this so-called manager approved this was also one of the variables that we saw previously let me open up another tab here me come back just so you absolutely clear what I'm talking about so we going to change approval policies whoops change approval policies normal change policy it's this first related listy of these policy inputs now so called inputs or variables that we want to use or reference later in our decisions so you can create any kind of variable that you hear here that you like and so we've got one here called manager approved and the manner is just a true/false field and if you look at it here it's not actually doing it we don't actually know what this is actually doing or how this is actually calculated I mean we get an idea of what it is by the name of it but what's going on here manager approved is true we've just kind of created this variable right here I mean I could call this whatever I like you know it doesn't really matter but here it's being referenced so we've basically got a variable here that we're saying is true or false but this variable in our particular case is actually referenced in one of these approval definitions I believe let me just check here if it is the cab approval one or not actually I don't think it was that one it was we do have an example in here change requests now what am I talking about I'm in the wrong position I need to go not here to the the policies we need to go to this work flight activity here so we saw here in the change approval policies for the technical approval and we actually didn't have anything here in the policy input so here you can define your own inputs here as well calculate your own inputs and this is basically what you're referencing in that other table now let me go to the this one here the second approval that we've got here yeah so yeah this is basically where we've referenced that manager approved variable that we defined before so basically we're just kind of writing out a little script here determined has a manager already approve this change request or not and on the basis of that we're going to calculate a value for this variable manager approved which we are then able to call in our decisions here to say if the manager approved is true or false okay so in other words you can create your own variables you can in the workflow activity you can calculate the values for those variables and then use them in your decision-making process yeah so hopefully that's given you a little bit of insight into the configuration underneath the hood for change policy change approval policies and service now from Madrid as I said it's a new feature in Madrid and yeah so if you are looking at this and you're wondering and looking at the workflow and coming here and going what is going on with this change approval policy I can't see any Islamic group I can't see who's going to approve this change request or not right here and it's true you can't you have to look at these new change approval policies so hopefully that's given you a little bit of insight you're a little bit clear on that and that's all for me so good luck with your work and see you next time