Managing changes
Managing changes to your company's increasingly complex information technology (IT) environment is a challenging job that can pay great rewards.
Establishing and following efficient and effective processes for managing change can provide your company with a competitive advantage. Effective change management helps you lower costs, avoid security exposures, ensure audit readiness, and minimize disruptions to your key services and applications.
- Change management overview
The Change process workflow ensures that each Change is completed efficiently. A flexible user interface enables you to create, assign, monitor, notify, and report the status of Change assessments, approvals, and implementation tasks, leveraging a best practice ITIL process with defined roles. - Planning for Changes
Before you start processing Changes in your data center, an administrator can perform a number of operations that will help you manage the Changes more effectively. The administrator can return to these operations after Changes are underway; at any time, for example, workflows, job plans, response plans, and blackout periods can be deleted or modified. However, it is strongly recommended that an administrator perform these steps to initially set up your environment for efficiently managing Changes. - Tracking ongoing changes
This product provides a number of features that help you track ongoing Changes. - Initiating a new Change
You can initiate a new Change in either of two ways: by creating and submitting a Request for Change (RFC) in the Process Requests application; or by going directly to the Changes application and creating the Change in response to another type of request or a perceived need in the data center. After an RFC is submitted, a Change Owner responds to the request and accepts or rejects the Change. - Accepting and categorizing a Change
The acceptance and categorization of a Change begins when a Change Owner examines a Change request to determine whether it can be accepted for consideration. If the request is accepted, a Change work order is automatically created in the Changes application. After required information is supplied, the Change is routed to the workflow, which applies a response plan if a relevant plan exists, validates the Change, starts the assessment phase. - Assessing a Change
After you initiate a new Change and route the Change to a workflow, the workflow sends notifications to all of the assessors and assessor groups that are assigned to perform technical and business assessments. Assessors record their assessments, adding any implementation notes that need to be considered for the Change. If a Change is preauthorized prior to the assessment step, the workflow skips both the assessment and the authorization phases. - Creating additional implementation tasks
After the assessment is complete, the Change Owner consults the implementation notes that were provided by the assessors and creates any additional implementation tasks that are needed for the Change. Tasks that are created during this step supplement those that are already in the job plan. - Conducting an impact analysis
Impact analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing which systems, applications, or other configuration items (CIs) will be affected by a proposed Change. For example, if the Change is to add memory to an application server, the applications that use that server will have an outage when the server is offline. Many other CIs might also be impacted. - Scheduling a Change
During the scheduling phase, you produce a schedule by which all of the tasks of a Change can be completed in the correct order, by the correct people, and with a minimum of disruption to the IT infrastructure. You create a schedule using the graphical tools provided by the Graphical Scheduling application. A Change Owner typically schedules the Change tasks, but you can assign any user to this phase. - Authorizing a Change
The Change authorization phase gives all of the stakeholders an opportunity to review the Change request and either approve or disapprove its continuation. During authorization, the workflow sends approval assignments to the approvers or approver groups that have these assignments. - Implementing a Change
During the implementation phase, implementation task owners receive task assignments when the tasks are ready to be performed. Task assignments are sent in the correct order; an assignment is sent only when any preceding task or tasks are completed. The implementation phase is completed when the owner of the last task in the Change indicates that his or her task has been completed. - Reviewing and closing a Change
After all implementation tasks are complete, the workflow sends an assignment to the Change Owner to determine whether the Change was successful. The Change Owner makes this determination through consultation with stakeholders, such as members of the Change Advisory Board, the RFC submitter, users, customers, and others. - Viewing a CI topology
When you are viewing a single authorized configuration item (CI) in the Configuration Items application, you can use the Topology subtab to view a graphical representation of the CI and its relationships with other CIs. - Using maps
After this product’s mapping functionality is configured for all of your sites, you can view world maps that show the geographic locations of selected records, indicate your location, and more. Maps are easily accessed within the applications used to manage the records.