Best Practice for Approval Groups in Change Management

[michelle kirk]

Do to our Platform being in a bit of mess with regards to Approval Groups, I am trying to understand what is the best practice for Approval of Changes.

We appear to have a change approval group every time a group is created, with the same people approving the same change multiple times as they are in so many groups.

What would be best practice in cleaning this up so the same people are not approving the same change multiple times and to reduce the number of Change Approval groups we have. 

Any help would be appreciated 

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

A group approval is send out to a group, that's the base. So if users are in multiple groups, they will be asked multiple times to approve something.

You should go back to the drawing board and check on the groups that are used for approval. Are they really only used for that, or are you using 'normal' groups as approval groups? Like the 'Service Desk' that is meant for picking up tickets, is that also used for approvals? If so, you have a mess.

Start cleaning up by just creating approval groups that are used for nothing else. And if on a certain level/stage a group needs to give approval, it's the users of that group that have to approve.

So let's say you have a first level group of application owners, you ask them for approval on a change. And the CAB approval is asked of the CAB group later. If someone is on the CAB and on the application owner group, he will still get it twice, but that's because his roles are asking that of him.