Recurring Changes

[klpawlenty]

Hi,
Reaching out to get ideas on how others have implemented recurring changes. We have Planned, Emergency, and Standard Change Types but I am trying to brainstorm a better way to handle changes that occurr weekly, monthly, thrid week of the month, etc. so they show up on the Change Calendar.

I was thinking of building a form where the schedule almost looks like the scheduled reports with a run frequency, days, and times.

Any ideas or if you could share how you may have implemented this would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Kari

[Mark Stanger]

You can use the out-of-box 'Scheduled Entity Generation' to accomplish this with ServiceNow's templates. That works fairly well, but it can be somewhat challenging to set up and it also has some limitations as to the amount of information you can copy. i.e., create a change and various change tasks, but not affected CIs, attachments, etc. Information can be found here...

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Creating_a_Scheduled_Job

At Crossfuze, we offer a comprehensive change management solution that includes full process and approval workflow for all of the change types you mentioned above. In addition, we've built an advanced templating system that allows you to use any existing change (with its associated tasks, CIs, and attachments) as templates that can be copied from. We also allow the scheduled creation of any change in the system via the same mechanism.

Feel free to contact me if you'd like more details.

[Mark Stanger]

You can use the out-of-box 'Scheduled Entity Generation' to accomplish this with ServiceNow's templates. That works fairly well, but it can be somewhat challenging to set up and it also has some limitations as to the amount of information you can copy. i.e., create a change and various change tasks, but not affected CIs, attachments, etc. Information can be found here...

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Creating_a_Scheduled_Job

At Crossfuze, we offer a comprehensive change management solution that includes full process and approval workflow for all of the change types you mentioned above. In addition, we've built an advanced templating system that allows you to use any existing change (with its associated tasks, CIs, and attachments) as templates that can be copied from. We also allow the scheduled creation of any change in the system via the same mechanism.

Feel free to contact me if you'd like more details.

[klpawlenty]

Here is what I was envisioning...
We already have an approved Standard Change, but the out of box schedule is one planned start and one planned end. I am envisioning that subsequent change records be created based on that approved Standard Change for multiple schedules (i.e. recurring for a whole year on a Monday for example). Maybe a check-box indicated that this is a recurring change could trigger that or maybe options on the Standard Change to select run time, frequency, and/or time range (like the out of box scheduled reports). I just wasn't sure if someone already implemented something simpler for these types of changes.

[Mark Stanger]

That's pretty much what we do, just copy from an existing change whether it's a preapproved change or something different. We leverage the out-of-box scheduling table in ServiceNow (so we get all of the run time, frequency, etc. just like scheduled reports for free) but have just hooked our change copying routine into it. The real challenge I see with what you're asking for is trying to pre-populate the change dates along with the change. We simply blank those out since the change still has to be executed by someone - which involves indicating when they're starting and ending work on the change.