Configuring change management

In FootPrints, change management is controlled via business process workflows and the business rules needed to manage the approval process. Business Process templates are shipped with the product and you can customize the workflows, rules, and containers included in that template to better match your working environment.

Approvals can be configured for any item type that allows you to configure a workflow process, such as tickets, CIs, solutions, services, and so on. You cannot configure approval processes for contacts or assets.

You can do any of the following:

Designate one or more states in a workflow as approval states. This designation can create new states named Approved and Rejected that you can configure with deadlines, rules, and approvers, or you can use existing states. Another option is to create multiple workflows to manage complex approval processes.
Define business rules to manage the voting process by creating rules that trigger on votes and then change the state of the related record to the next appropriate state. The rule actions (to approve or reject) can be based on submitted votes reaching a certain number or a certain percentage.
Designate a default workspace for incoming approval votes so users won't have to include a workspace ID in their emails.

For detailed information, see the Related topics.

Managing user access

To enable users to vote, they must be assigned either view or edit permissions for the records on which they need to vote. Either permission is sufficient to permit voting

To make it possible for users to vote, you must add an Approvals section to the appropriate forms. This section includes action buttons for Approve, Reject and Defer, along with a Comments field. Voters can review the votes submitted to date and can change their votes as needed as long as the approval process is active for a record.

Remember to assign your users to the appropriate groups so you can select them efficiently for approval tasks.

Prerequisites

The following are required before you configure a change management process:

Users, user roles, containers, and work schedules are already defined so you can select them from the Business Workflow graph.
An incoming email account is defined for your system or (optionally) your workspace.

Next step

Creating approval processes