RCI Projects have a dedicated section for defining custom approval rules. These rules allow you to specify exactly which users or roles (like Project Manager or Technical Lead) must approve changes based on criteria like risk or type, providing project-specific control without altering enterprise-wide Change Management settings.

In RCI, the visual Gantt chart for a project is generated based on the Project Tasks and their planned start/end dates. The ‘Go Live’ date on the chart is derived from the end date of the final task or milestone, not directly from the Release Schedule record. Updating the Release Schedule alone does not automatically adjust the project task timeline.

The Service Impact Assessment is a core RCI component designed specifically for this purpose. It allows teams to formally identify and link the CIs and business services that will be affected by the project, documenting the nature of the impact and any required mitigation plans, which is crucial for informed go/no-go decisions.

The Project Archive function is the formal, built-in mechanism for this. Archiving a project creates a read-only snapshot of the entire project record, including all its related records, tasks, conversations, and attachments. This preserves the complete context and evidence in a single, immutable location within the ServiceNow platform, ideal for compliance and historical reference.

RCI’s ‘Project Lite’ is designed for precisely this scenario—smaller, well-understood initiatives that don’t require the full project lifecycle. It provides a lightweight framework with essential tracking, task management, and approval steps, offering more structure than a lone change request but less overhead than a full project, perfect for urgent, tactical deployments.

The ‘Budget Allocated’ field on the RCI Project record is the official field for storing the total approved financial budget for the project. This figure serves as the baseline for financial tracking, allowing the system to compare ‘Actual Cost’ (sum of all financial task costs) against this allocated budget to calculate variances and monitor spending health.

Creating a customized dashboard is the most efficient and dynamic solution. The administrator can build a dashboard with relevant widgets like Project Portfolio, Budget Variance Chart, and Project Timeline/Gantt. The stakeholder can then access this real-time, self-service view anytime without waiting for manual reports, and the data is always current.

The Risk Score is a calculated numeric value (typically Probability x Impact) that provides an objective, quantitative basis for comparing different risks. This allows the project team to quickly identify and focus their mitigation efforts on the highest-scoring risks (the ones with high probability and high impact), which is a fundamental principle of effective risk management.

The Governance Model in an RCI Project is specifically designed to define the stage-gate approval process. You can add a gate (e.g., ‘Architecture Review Gate’) to the transition between phases (like Planning to Execution) and specify the required approvers or groups. This makes the checkpoint a formal, tracked part of the project lifecycle.

RCI Projects have a dedicated section for defining custom approval rules. These rules allow you to specify exactly which users or roles (like Project Manager or Technical Lead) must approve changes based on criteria like risk or type, providing project-specific control without altering enterprise-wide Change Management settings.0