Configuring change management

Change Management enables you to make changes in a controlled way, with minimum disruption to your business operations. The Change Management module in Track-It! allows you to plan, schedule, implement, and track changes required in your organization. For example, if multiple users in your organization are creating tickets for the same issue, you might need to implement a change to resolve the issue.

Overview of change management

Sometimes, when you discover a problem in your IT system due to recurring incidents and investigate the problem, you must identify the changes must be made to permanently work around or solve the root cause. You can link the ticket that are created because of an issue and link a change request that will be implemented to resolve the issue.

Based on the permissions that you configure for technicians, they can create and link a change request to a ticket in Track-It!. Technicians can manually create a change request or configure change policies that create a change request when a ticket matches the criteria specified in any of the change policies. As a part of a change policy, you can also define an approval process that can have multiple approval stages. If the change request is approved or rejected, you can complete it and close the change request.

The following figure shows the process of change management:

Benefits of change management

Implementing change management can effectively help an organization to reduce recurring incidents. By performing a comprehensive risk and impact analysis of a change request, technicians can make important decisions, such as when to implement a change.

Change management helps to:

• Reduce the cost of change
• Increase understanding of risks
• Decrease total change planning and approval time
• Reduce outages resulting from changes
• Increase changes delivered on time and within budget

Configuring change policies

A change policy determines if a change request must be created and linked to a ticket. Based on the conditions configured for a change policy, you can configure change policies to create a change request is created automatically when the ticket matches certain criteria specified in the change policy. You can also create multiple stages for approval of a change request.

Note the following important points about configuring a change policy:

• You must create at least one stage of approval for the change policy.
• You can only define requestors as approvers. If you want to define a technician as an approver, you must create the technician as a requestor. For more information, see Creating and managing requestors.
• You can define multiple approvers for a stage. In this case, you must set a minimum number of approvers who will approve the change request to move it to the next stage of approval.
• By configuring multiple stages of approval, you can create a hierarchical approval structure for a change request. For example, a change request for upgrading to a new version can be assigned to the supervisors for approval at the first stage, managers for approval at the second stage, and senior management for approval at the third stage.
• You must configure at least one condition that must be met for a ticket to be created automatically.
• By default, a new change policy is in an inactive state. You must activate the change policy to make it effective.
• Based on the change policy that you configure, you can configure Business Rules to send email notifications to the approvers, requestors, and technicians informing them about the status of the change request and linked ticket.
• The Expected Due Date of a change request is calculated based on the Work Schedule, Timezone, and Decision Due Date of a change policy. If your work schedule includes weekend or other holidays, the expected due date is adjusted accordingly.

Understanding how change policies are applied to create change requests

Consider the following important points:

• When a ticket is created and only one change policy matches the ticket criteria, a change request is created automatically and linked to the ticket.
• When a ticket is created and multiple change policies match the ticket criteria, a change request is created for the change policy that best matches the ticket criteria. The following ranking is taken into consideration to determine the best matched change policy:
  
  • Requestor
  • Department
  • Location
  • Category
• Change policies that are not linked to any ticket can be manually linked to the current ticket while creating or updating the ticket, irrespective of the criteria which may or may not match the change policy criteria.

Creating a change policy

1. On the header bar, expand the hamburger menu  and select Configuration.
2. Click Application Settings > Change Policies.
3. On the Change Policies page, click New.
4. In the Add Change Policy dialog box, in the Policy Name field, enter a name.
5. To activate the change policy, clear the Inactive check box.
6. In the Description field, enter a brief description about the change policy.
7. In the Decision Due Date section, enter the days and hours by which you want the change approval process to be completed.
8. In the Define Conditions section, perform the following actions:
   1. From the Work Schedule list, select a work schedule.
   2. From the Time Zone list, select an appropriate time zone.
9. In the Define Matching Criteria section, perform the following actions:
   
   1. From the Select a Field list, select a field that you want to use to configure the change policy, such as Priority.
   2. From the Select a Condition list, select a required condition.
   3. From the Select/Enter a Value list, select or enter a field value.
   4. To add the defined condition, click .
   5. (Optional) To add another condition, repeat step 11a to step 11d.
   6. (Optional) To delete a condition, click .
10. In the Define Approvers section, perform the following actions:
    
    1. To define Stage 1, from the Select Approvers list, based on your requirements, select one or more approvers.
    2. In the Select min. approvals required field, select a minimum number of approvals required for the stage.
       For example, you can assign three approvers for the stage, but you can set a minimum of two approvals required to move the change request to the next stage.
    3. (Optional) To add another stage, click , and repeat step 12a to step 12c.
    4. (Optional) To rearrange the sequence of stages, click .
    5. (Optional) To delete a stage, click .
11. Click Save.

Editing or deleting a change policy

1. Navigate to the Change Policy page (hamburger menu > Configurations > Change Policies).

2. On the Change Policy page, perform one of the following actions:

   To edit the change policy	Select a change policy and click Edit . In the Edit Change Policy dialog box, edit the required details. Click Save. Note: If you edit a change policy, the existing change requests are not impacted. Only the change requests created after editing the change policy are impacted.
   To delete the change policy	Select a change policy and click Delete. In the Delete Record dialog box, click Yes. Note: If you delete a change policy, all references to that change policy are removed. Also, the existing change requests are not impacted.