Scheduling changes by using the Calendar

The Calendar is a dynamic console for scheduling, managing, and monitoring incidents, problems, changes, releases, and secondary data sources like the related activities and manifest. It is intended to be used by enterprise CIOs and members of the Change Advisory Board (CAB), usually during a CAB meeting, to view incidents, problems, changes, releases, planned and unplanned CI outages, and business events occurring in the organization for a given duration. The calendar displays the details of the events similar to the way a project management application shows activities and tasks, except that the Change Calendar is more dynamic and interactive.

The Calendar also displays information about incidents, problems, and unplanned CI outages.

• Calendar functional areas
• Viewing data by using the Calendar view formats
• Detecting collisions by using the Calendar
• Creating custom queries in the Change Calendar
• Exporting Calendar events to an ICS file

Calendar overview

The Calendar displays the following information in a calendar-like schedule for a selected duration:

• Problems and incidents with their reported dates and target dates.
  
• Changes and releases with their scheduled start and end dates.
• Business events and activities.
• Planned and unplanned outages (CI unavailability):
  • A planned outage is the planned, scheduled downtime of a CI. Typically, a planned outage occurs during a scheduled change.
  • An unplanned outage occurs when the CI experiences a sudden, unpredictable service downtime. Typically, an unplanned outage is caused by an incident.

You can drag changes and releases to or edit them within the Calendar. This functionality is not available for problems and incidents.

Filters enable you to select the primary data sources (incidents, problems, changes, and releases) and secondary data sources (such as business events and outages) in the Calendar view. Other secondary data sources, such as tasks or manifests related to the corresponding primary data sources, can be viewed in the Timeline view of the Calendar.

With the help of links to investigative and analysis tools, the Calendar can help you better understand the risk and impact of changes and releases. Because of better planning, you can make more productive decisions about the forward schedule of changes (FSC). The Calendar also helps you consider potential conflicts by displaying both events and outages for the selected duration.

Investigative links are provided that help determine whether multiple incidents were created as the result of an outage, enabling you to determine whether the incidents could have been prevented. For example, if multiple incidents were submitted because an email server went offline because of a patch installation, the administrator can create a problem and also broadcast the outage. The Calendar can thus help you consider interdependencies.

You can configure the maximum number of records that are displayed in the Calendar. For more information, see Limiting the number of records that appear in the Calendar. If the number of records exceeds the limit that you set, the Calendar does not display all the records. For example, if the limit is set to display 100 records, only the first 100 records are displayed. By default, the records that are displayed are sorted by the start date and the start time of the activity.

Example of using Change Calendar

Allen is implementing a new payroll system in the organization. The installation of the new payroll server will affect the availability of other servers in the organization. The Calendar can help Allen decide the most convenient time to start this implementation with minimum impact to the people of the organization.

When Allen views the Calendar, he can see the complete details of the events for the duration in the view configured by the application administrator.

By looking at the Calendar view for a month, Allen can quickly decide that scheduling a major server installation on a particular day that has multiple events, would overload already strained resources. Any day that has fewer events would be more promising. The Calendar displays not only scheduled change or release requests, but also planned outages or business events, giving Allen better visibility of the load for the selected duration.

If required, Allen can switch to the week to look more closely at the week's schedule or select a Day view to get a more granular view of the data. He can use the arrows next to the timeline bar to move to an earlier or later time period of the selected duration.

After Allen finds a time when no time segments are blocked, he can decide to schedule the payroll server installation. The server installation schedule can overlap other software application installations based on the organization's configuration policy.

When Allen schedules the installation, if the server installation impacts a CI that might be unavailable or required by another request during that time, the Calendar provides an indication of colliding records. He can also view the Service Context summary for a Service CI related to the change or release request.

Additionally, Allen can select a request from the Calendar and view essential details like the ID, status, and so on, or open the change request by using the Open option from the right-click menu on the Calendar. He can click the Details flyout pane to view additional details including Collisions and Impact.