Change Management processes

This section describes the Change Management processes.

Initiate and record

Initiate and record is the initial stage of the change management process. It focuses on recording the purpose of the change request, and on obtaining the additional information needed to classify and route the request.

The primary sources of change requests are:

• Problem Management , including the known error feature
• Incident management  
• BMC Service Request Management  

The key features available in Change Management designed to support this stage of the process include: 

• Requester Console   
• Auto assignment of change requests at the group and individual level
• Release Management 
• Support for multi-tier classification using the product and operational catalogs
• Best practice  change templates

Review and authorize

After the initial request has been submitted, the next logical stage is review and authorize. The purpose of this stage is for the change manager to assess the change request, provide any additional information to add more context, and, if required, initiate the corresponding approval process. This stage acts as the initial filter to determine if the change request should continue to the next stage in the process.

The features in Change Management designed to support this stage of the process include:

• Change console
• Assessing the risk for a change request
• Support for relating CIs from the BMC Atrium CMDB
• Change impact analysis
• Integration with the Remedy Approval Server
• Request acknowledgment setting

Plan and schedule

After the change request has been approved for work to begin, the next stage is to plan resources and schedules to ensure minimal impact to the production environment. After the planning and scheduling are complete, the change request goes through another approval process.

The features available in Change Management designed to support this stage of the process include:

• Change calendar
• Change impact analysis
• Costing (budgeted)
• Schedule Assist
• Collision detection
• Integration with the Remedy Approval Server
• Integration with Task Management System
  • Task templates
  • Task viewer

Implement

The Implement stage consists of executing against the plan and accomplishing the work. 

The features available in Change Management that are designed to support this stage of the process include:

• Task Management System
• Task phase management
• Task automation
• Effort tracking
• Costing (actual)
• Work info

Complete and close

The Complete and Close is the final stage of a change request. This stage indicates either that the change request has been completed successfully, or that is was canceled with either of the following status reasons. 

Completed

• Final Review Required
• Final Review Complete
• Additional Coding Required

Closed

• Successful
• Successful with Issues
• Unsuccessful
• Backed Out
• Automatically Cancelled

All the data elements (time, cost, and so on) are rolled up and recorded.

For information about the status reason descriptions, see Change request status reasons.