Overview of the BMC Change Management integration

This topic provides an overview of the integration with BMC Change Management. It contains the following sections:

BMC Change Management integration benefits (video)

The following video provides an overview of the benefits of integrating BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management with BMC Change Management.

How the integration with BMC Change Management works

When you integrate BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management with BMC Change Management, service requests that you generate from a service offering instance in your cloud environment can generate change requests in BMC Change Management based on service offering configuration.

BMC Change Management is automatically installed and integrated with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management when you select the BMC AR System Server and IT Service Management Suite option at installation. However, you do need to perform a couple of steps to complete the integration:

Optionally, you can also perform the following:

Out-of-the-box support

Out-of-the-box, only the provisioning of a service offering instance is supported with the BMC Change Management integration.

However, the integration framework also supports various actions, such as start service offering instance, stop service offering instance, extend service offering instance, decommission service offering instance, modify server, start server, stop server, and add or remove storage. You can configure the integration for such actions. For more information, see Extending the integration with BMC Change Management.

This topic provides a description of the out-of-the-box change policies and describes how to assciate a change policy with a service offering in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

The cloud administrator or a user with administrator permissions creating a service offering determines which change policy should be associated to the service offering. The end user who selects the service offering instance is typically unaware of the underlying change policy associated with that service offering.

Change policies available out-of-the-box

A change policy determines how the service request is processed in BMC Change Management. Out-of-the-box, the following types of change policies are available:

No Change Required
Change Approval Required
Pre-Authorized Change
Audit-only Change

The change class indicates the urgency of the change request.

Note

Except for the No Change Required policy, each change policy is mapped to a change class.

The following table maps a change policy to a change class attribute in BMC Change Management:

Change policy to change class mapping

Change policy	Change class	Description
Change Approval Required	Standard	Indicates a change that requires approval. Typically, this policy is pre-approved and only requires approval by the Infrastructure Change Manager. It follows the out-of-the-box change process defined by ITIL specifications.
Pre-Authorized Change	No Impact	Indicates a change that has no impact on the infrastructure and does not require approval. For example, a cloud end user requests a low-cost service offering instance which does not require a manager's approval. By default, this type of change follows the Business Approval - No Impact phase and moves to Scheduled status. Use this process for pre-approved No Impact changes where the change is automatically scheduled.
Audit-only Change	Latent	Indicates a change that has already been performed. For example, a task implementer assigned to replace the hard drive on a computer decides to upgrade the memory while working on the computer. Latent timing automatically sets the request status to Completed after you save the change request.

The following table maps change policy to a BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change template.

Note

Except for the No Change Required policy, each change policy is mapped to a BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change template.

Change policy to cloud change template mapping

Change policy	BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change template
Change approval required	CLM: Manual change
Pre-Authorized change	CLM: Pre Authorized change
Audit-only change	CLM: Audit only change

By default, a standard task template, Standard Cloud Task, is assigned to the policies that are mapped to change templates. The following figure illustrates the relation of a cloud service request to a change request:

About the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change process

The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change process differs from the standard change process. The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management process does not require manual intervention by the Change Manager or Change Coordinator. For more information about user roles in BMC Change Management, see User roles. The standard change process stages, such as Request for Change, Scheduled for Review, and Scheduled, which require manual intervention, are not used by BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management change policies follow the change process stages as shown in the following figure:

The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management-initiated change request already contains attributes and tasks, Therefore, the Change Manager or Change Coordinator does not need to add or update the change request. However, the Change Approver must approve or reject a change request by using the Change Approval Required policy.

How BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management service requests use the change policies

The process workflow follows the information present in the change policy and the change template.

Service requests assigned to the Change Approval Required change policy

The cloud end user or administrator initiates a service request by using the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management portal. When the service request is initiated, a change request is automatically created in BMC Change Management. The change request is assigned the Draft status.

The task related data is automatically populated for the standard cloud task depending on the information in the change policy and the associated change template. The status of the change request is now changed to Request for Authorization.

The approver for the specified cloud change approval process approves or rejects the change request depending on the change class associated with the change template. The Change Approver does not need any special permissions to approve or reject a change request approval.

If the approver for the specified cloud change approval process approves the change request, the status of the change request is changed to Scheduled.
If the approver for the specified cloud change approval process rejects the change request, the status of the change request is changed to Fail, and the tasks associated with the service request are canceled.

When the change request approval is approved, the tasks related to the service request are executed in the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management portal. The status of the change request is now changed to Approval Pending:In Progress. When the tasks are completed, the status of the change request is changed to Completed. Depending on the approval rules defined, the status of the change request is changed to Closed.

Service requests assigned to the Pre-Authorized Change policy

The service requests assigned to the Pre-Authorized Change policy are automatically approved.

Service requests assigned to the Audit-only Change policy

The service requests assigned to the Audit-only Change policy does not execute tasks in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. The status of the change request is automatically changed to Completed.

Where to go from here

Assigning a change policy to a service offering