Geneva: Take Control Of Your Low Risk Changes With the Standard Change Catalog

[Mike Malcangio]

In our first entry - Change Management in Geneva - Making Change a Little Less Painful we outlined some of the new features in Geneva for Change Management. Now we are going to take a deeper dive on what I believe is one of the more innovative and useful features introduced in Geneva for Change Management — the Standard Change Catalog.

So what is Standard Change? And what is a Standard Change Catalog? These are both excellent questions.

ITIL¹ describes three types of Changes that an organization can make - Normal, Emergency, and Standard.

• Normal - Changes that follow the organization's change approval process including being reviewed, approved, and scheduled by the Change Advisory Board (CAB).
• Emergency - Changes which need to be handled in an expedited manner because there is a critical need in the organization to fix a problem with their infrastructure. The Emergency Change will bypass some of the normal approval steps but will still be reviewed by CAB.
• Standard - Changes that are low-risk, have been done routinely and successfully, and can be executed without additional approval or review.

The Standard Change Catalog is collection of those pre-approved Changes that an organization can leverage.

In Geneva, we've made it so that you can quickly access the Changes in the Standard Change Catalog:

Once a standard change is selected, users can change the specifics -- like what CI they are changing and when -- but not the bones of the Change (the implementation plan, blackout plan, etc.):

Change Managers can create these Standard Changes from existing changes:

Or create a new templates from scratch:

You'll notice that I added an arrow to the screenshot above. I wanted to highlight that you can actually specify any number of fields to be populated in the change and not the just the few that we've suggested in the template. This makes for an extremely flexible and powerful solution for building out your Standard Change Library. You can see how in environments that are more DevOps oriented a library of standard changes could allow for an extremely agile without a lot of needless overhead -- more on that in a future installment.

For more details about creating and maintaining Standard Changes check out the Geneva Docs on Standard Change.

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^{1. Did you know that ITIL is no longer an acronym? It's a registered term and name of the framework now — but it doesn't stand for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Live and learn.↩}