Preparing Your ServiceNow Platform for the New Year: A Practical Guide for System Administrators

The start of a new year creates a natural pause. It is one of the few moments when teams can step back from day-to-day work and look at their ServiceNow environment more deliberately.

For most organizations, the goal at this moment is focus. It is about making sure the platform is stable, secure, and set up to support the work ahead. Larger initiatives absolutely have their place, but this guide is centered on the foundational work that keeps those efforts moving smoothly.

This guide is meant to help you do exactly that. You can use it as a hands-on checklist for your internal team, or as a way to scope where outside support might save time and reduce risk. Either way, the focus is on clarity, practicality, and forward momentum.

Start With the Foundation and Your Upgrade Path

Before looking at optimization, it helps to understand the condition of the foundation you are building on. That starts with knowing where you sit in the ServiceNow release cycle and whether a family upgrade should be part of your plan this year.

ServiceNow continues to evolve in meaningful ways across automation, user experience, data management, and governance. Staying reasonably current helps reduce long-term technical debt and keeps future options open. It also makes everything else on this list easier. (Reminder: ServiceNow generally provides platform support only for the current release and the one immediately before it, so staying no more than about one release behind helps ensure you continue to receive patches, documentation, and technical assistance as part of your subscription.)

An upgrade, however, should be intentional.

At the beginning of the year, focus on orientation rather than execution.

Practical starting points:

• Confirm your current release and how far behind the current family you are.
• Review the Zurich release and identify changes that are relevant to how your teams actually use the platform today.
• Take inventory of customizations and integrations and note which ones are actively maintained versus “set and forgotten.”

Questions that help determine readiness:

• Do you have a recent clone of production available for testing?
• Is there a realistic approach to validating core workflows after an upgrade?
• Have you reviewed known upgrade considerations for the applications you rely on most?
• Is there a clear recovery plan if something does not behave as expected?

If the answers are unclear, that is not a failure. It simply means upgrade planning itself belongs on the first-quarter list.

Review Performance and Overall Instance Health

Performance issues rarely show up all at once. More often, they surface as extra clicks, slower load times, and workarounds that gradually become part of the routine.

A focused review early in the year can surface issues before they start to limit adoption or confidence in the platform.

Areas to review:

• Slow transactions and long-running queries.
• Table growth trends and candidates for archiving or cleanup.
• Scheduled jobs and background processes that may no longer be necessary.
• Recent changes that could be contributing to degraded performance.

The goal here is clarity rather than perfection. Clear visibility makes it easier to prioritize what is worth addressing now versus later.

Revisit Roles, Access, and Security Configuration

Access models naturally drift as organizations grow and change. Roles are added for good reasons and then rarely revisited.

Starting the year with a cleanup reduces risk and simplifies future work.

Practical steps:

• Review active roles and remove access that is no longer required.
• Identify users with elevated privileges and confirm ownership and justification.
• Validate authentication and single sign-on configurations against current policies.
• Review audit activity for unusual or outdated access patterns.

This work rarely draws attention, but it becomes invaluable during audits, incidents, or platform upgrades.

Simplify Automation and Reduce Workflow Sprawl

Automation works best when it reflects how work happens in practice. Over time, many environments collect workflows that are outdated, lightly used, or poorly understood.

An annual reset is a good opportunity to bring automation back into focus.

A practical approach:

• Inventory active workflows and flows.
• Identify which ones are critical, which are rarely used, and which no longer match current processes.
• Retire or consolidate workflows that add complexity without clear value.
• Assign ownership for the workflows that remain.

If you are exploring newer automation capabilities, start with one or two high-friction processes rather than trying to modernize everything at once.

Validate Integrations and Data Movement

Integrations are easy to overlook until they fail. A proactive review helps avoid surprises.

What to check:

• Build a simple inventory of integrations and data sources.
• Confirm each integration still supports a real business need.
• Review error rates, failures, and latency trends.
• Identify integrations that may benefit from simplification or updated patterns.

This step also supports future upgrades by reducing unknown dependencies.

Improve the User Experience Where It Matters Most

User experience improvements do not require a full redesign to be effective. Small changes can remove daily friction and increase confidence in the platform.

Start with what you see and hear rather than assumptions.

Actionable ideas:

• Gather quick feedback from a small group of frequent and infrequent users.
• Identify the most common points of confusion or delay.
• Improve labels, instructions, and navigation where users hesitate.
• Confirm key workflows behave consistently across devices and browsers.

A short list of targeted fixes often delivers more impact than a broad initiative.

Refresh Knowledge and Self-Service Content

Knowledge content quietly ages. Articles fall out of sync with processes, terminology changes, and ownership becomes unclear.

A regular review keeps self-service useful.

Practical steps:

• Review article usage and last-updated dates.
• Retire or revise content that is no longer relevant.
• Identify gaps tied to common requests or incidents.
• Assign clear ownership for maintaining high-value articles.

Well-maintained knowledge supports both users and service desk teams.

Reassess SLAs, Reporting, and What You Measure

Over time, reports and dashboards tend to multiply. Not all of them continue to support decision-making.

The start of the year is a good moment to refocus.

Suggested actions:

• Review SLA definitions and confirm they still align with business expectations.
• Analyze recent SLA breaches and look for patterns.
• Retire dashboards that are no longer referenced.
• Focus reporting on a small set of metrics that inform real decisions.

Clear reporting makes it easier to explain priorities and justify future investment.

Reinforce Governance Without Adding Friction

Governance does not need to be heavy to be effective. It does need to be consistent.

Helpful starting points:

• Clarify how requests for new configuration or development are evaluated.
• Define standards for customization versus configuration.
• Set expectations for documentation and ongoing ownership.
• Establish a regular cadence for reviewing platform priorities and changes.

Good governance supports steady delivery and fewer surprises.

Turning This into a Realistic Plan

Most teams will not tackle everything on this list at once. The value comes from choosing a manageable set of priorities and executing them well.

Some organizations will use this as a hands-on checklist. Others will decide that having experienced support handle platform health, upgrades, and backlog cleanup is the better use of time.

Both paths are valid. What matters is starting the year with intention, shared understanding, and a platform that is ready to support what comes next.

If it’s not immediately clear where to begin, that uncertainty is often useful information on its own. It usually means there are unanswered questions about platform health, upgrade readiness, or where the most meaningful effort should be spent first.

A short platform assessment can help bring that clarity quickly. It looks at the same areas outlined above, things like release posture, instance health, security configuration, automation sprawl, and reporting, and turns them into a clear picture of what matters most right now versus what can wait. Instead of reacting to issues as they surface throughout the year, you start with a shared understanding of priorities and a practical path forward. We, of course, can help you with that – simply get in touch.

Happy new year!