Learning about Change Management

Initiate and record

When you initiate a change request, you must record essential information about the change, such as its class (standard, normal, no impact, emergency, expedited, latent), affected configuration items (CIs), scheduled dates, risk level, and supporting documents. Smart IT provides a wizard-like interface for creating change requests. The wizard helps you provide essential information. Some fields are filled in automatically for you, even if you do not use a template. For example, the system assumes that you are requesting the change for yourself, and the company and location information defaults to your company and location. If you have the role of Change Coordinator in your support group, you are automatically assigned as the change coordinator for the change request. If you use a template, values in the template take precedence over system defaults.  For more information, see Creating and managing change requests.

Review and authorize

Designated approvers can review change request details and approve or reject the change by using Smart IT. For more information, see Reviewing and approving release tickets.

Plan and schedule

Smart IT can help you plan when to make the change. The dates you choose should avoid conflicts with other change requests that are related to the same CIs and scheduled during the same time frame. In Smart IT, you can run impact analysis and collision detection for a change request. These functions help you identify all impacted CIs, and then manage any conflicts with other change requests and outages that affect the same CIs. The universal client also includes a change calendar that shows collisions in a graphical format. For more information, see Managing change request collisions in Smart IT.

When you schedule the change, plan for any needed outage. You can link outages to the change request, by relating an existing outage or creating a new outage (see Relating items to the current ticket ).

Implement

The process to implement a change involves a set of tasks. A task represents a specific set of steps and is assigned to a task implementer. The task implementer can locate the assigned tasks in Ticket Console. If you use a change template to create a change request, the tasks that are needed to complete the change are automatically included. After the change is initiated, you can also add and assign tasks by using task and task group templates, or by adding ad hoc tasks. For more information, see Adding tasks to tickets in Smart IT.

Complete and close

In Smart IT, the change request lifecycle is managed through status transitions. When all of the tasks are completed, the change request status changes to Completed. After recording the actual dates for the change and entering any final notes, you can set the status to Closed.