Royal Caribbean - ServiceNow DevOps Slackbot
Working with the Royal Caribbean team on a software platform called Excalibur, we designed and built a custom ServiceNow and Slack integration - a human-in-the-loop (HITL) Go/No-Go approval app that pairs rapid automation with human judgment to accelerate software delivery.
About the project
Royal Caribbean set out to upfit its fleet of cruise ships with modern technologies - facial recognition, AI, and data science - in a hybrid cloud environment, through a massive five-year program they named Excalibur. At its peak the program was managing about 1,200 developers from all over the world. Onboarding, managing, training, and getting release commits from a distributed team that size was extremely painful.
The Challenge
Efficiently onboarding, monitoring, and managing a large software development workforce.
Key issues identified
- Effective collaboration between product development teams was difficult at Royal Caribbean because often multiple employee teams from a variety of functional areas needed to coordinate process changes and orchestrate approvals.
- Describing and tracking proposed changes, monitoring updates and appeals, and ultimately securing and recording final approval often required days or even weeks of administrative and managerial time. All the while, administrators had to take care that changes made by one team did not cancel, limit, or prevent changes implemented by another team, either now or in the future.
- To save both time and financial resources, as well as eliminate errors, the product release management team needed an efficient system that could scale to the number of users, products, features, and functions needed. Royal Caribbean needed a quicker, more efficient way to alert and engage all decision makers so they could easily approve or reject new requests and rapidly communicate changing requirements.
The Goals
Create new tooling and features that would accelerate speed to delivery.
Challenge
Royal Caribbean protocols required that each time a team member made a product or procedural amendment, the change had to be approved by each of more than 50 employee teams via a rigorous manual review and confirmation process. The time required to approve or reject a change was compounded by the fact that this complex process required Royal Caribbean's release management teams to complete multiple iterations of the approval process for each product change - even if the change was rejected.
Solution
By developing a custom integration between ServiceNow and Slack, a streamlined Go/No-Go approval app was designed and implemented. This lightweight app electronically engages all product stakeholders and automatically alerts them about the status of their pending approvals. Today, about 200 users review and collaborate on a single request to perform impact and risk analysis of a specific release - and provide the necessary approvals from Slack with just one click.
Product Strategy
The strategy was simple - automate the busywork, and keep humans in the loop for what matters. Rapid automation moves requests, alerts, and documentation through ServiceNow and Slack, while every Go/No-Go stays a deliberate, human-in-the-loop approval.
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Ease of use through extension
Create new slash commands and interaction logic to extend the integration and run a range of actions right from Slack.
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Immediate movement
Approve or reject any request from Slack - sent as a direct message or to a channel.
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Immediate awareness
Notify Slack users about any event that occurs in ServiceNow.
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Automated documentation
Spin up on-demand Slack channels from ServiceNow; all related discussion is archived back in ServiceNow once the item is closed.
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Immediate action
Let users self-assign any request or incident with a single Assign to me button.
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Easy monitoring
View and update requests from Slack without ever logging into ServiceNow.
The product
Product Experience Highlights
Intuitive extensions for effortless scaling
Empower teams to expand functionality without complexity. Modular add-ons make it easy to tailor workflows and scale the product to meet evolving needs - no heavy dev work required.
Real-time alerts drive immediate action
Smart notifications ensure the right people get the right info at the right moment - enabling faster response times, fewer delays, and better outcomes.
Instant actions keep things moving
Interactive messages let teams respond and make decisions right inside their workflow - no switching tools, no waiting, just momentum.
Seamless visibility for smarter workflows
Stay updated in real time with automated status updates and ticket tracking - all in one place, without disrupting the flow.
Rich and his team had a huge impact on our ability to more efficiently push our teams, processes, and code releases for our smartship guest and staff apps.
Go/No-Go approvals, moved from several weeks to a few clicks.
By pairing rapid automation with human-in-the-loop approvals, the system streamlined workflows across IT, employees, and customers - improving visibility, accelerating decisions, and reducing operational friction so teams could move faster and deliver at scale.