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, prevent changes implemented by another team, either now or in the future.

To save both time and financial resources, as well as to eliminate errors, the product release management team needed an efficient system that could scale to number of users, products, features, and functions needed. Royal Caribbean needed a quicker and more efficient way to alert and engage all decision makers so they could easily approve or reject new requests and rapidly communicate changing requirements.

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.

By developing a custom integration between ServiceNow and Slack, a streamlined Go NoGo Approval App was designed and implemented. This lightweight app electronically engages all product stakeholders and automatically alerts them regarding the status of their pending approvals. Currently, about 200 users review and collaborate on one single request to perform impact/risk analysis of specific release and provide necessary approvals from Slack with just one click