Change Approval Workflow Based on Assignment Group

[bvarian]

My company has a distributed IT management structure and I've been asked to align Change Management to it.

Basically, we'd like to have a CAB approval group & workflow for Corporate/Core infrastructure changes, then additional CAB approval groups and workflows for other business units who will manage/approve their own Change events and have their own CAB meetings.

I've created an additional CAB approval group and copied my Corporate/Core workflow, then updated the approval step to direct to that new CAB group.   So I have that done fine.

I'm struggling though with the implementation mechanics of building the first one to test.

My first thought was to add an additional item to the System Definition > Interceptors > Change Request (change_request.do) list so the specific business unit could choose their location as a point of entry to the Create Change form.   But looking at the existing items there (normal/emergency/etc) as examples, I don't see any way to specify opening the Create Change form with a specific workflow attached.

And honestly, I thought this was way too much complexity...everyone should be able to use the same Create Change form and there be some smart logic that chose the workflow based on the site the Change was being made for (as defined by the Assignment Group...every site has one or more Assignment Groups so a correlation would be easy). So if assignment group=Corp Infrastructure, it follows the Corp Change workflow; if assignment group=SiteA Infrastructure, it follows the SiteA Change Workflow.  

Here's where I'm stuck.   I cannot seem to find a method, place or syntax with which to apply this evaluation and routing.  

I'd be very grateful if anyone has done this and could share some insights, up to and including what script you used and how/where you applied it.  

Many thanks!

[Ashutosh Munot1 · Accepted solution]

HI Brian,

Please correct me if i am wrong.

So you want to have assignment group based workflow attachment to you change request right?

If yes then you can give a condition in you workflow itself that when should this be attached.

When you create a workflow you are asked about condition. If you are not aware of this then see below screen shot. Again you can clear my doubts on this.

Thank you,
Ashutosh

Please Hit Correct, Helpful or like,if you are satisfied with this response.

[bvarian]

That worked Ashutosh.

So what I did was this....

I created a CAB approval group for one of my sites that wants to do its own Change Control separate from the central one.

Next, I copied my existing Normal Change Control workflow, saved a copy of the workflow with a name that specified it was for that site, updated the CAB approval step to point to that site's group, and on the conditions tab I used "condition matches" and for the condition, I used "assignment group starts with XXX" (because all my site-based assignment groups' names start with their location code).   I gave this an order number that will be lower than my Normal Change Control workflow so it evaluates the condition against this site/assignment group and its workflow prior to adopting the centralized workflow.  

I tested creating a couple Change Control entries and got the desired Approvers based on the choice of Assignment Group.

So now, I'll repeat this process for the Emergency Change Control workflow, following the same pattern/order number and test it with this one site to fully vet it.

Assuming it goes well, I'll be able to repeat this same process for any other sites that require their own CAB group and Change Control workflow.  

Best of all, outside of the approvals, the Change Control items will remain in one place and can be viewed by existing views/reports and conflict tools.

[Ashutosh Munot1]

Great PLease mark it Correct.

Thank You,

Ashutosh

[E_19]

Hi Brian, depending how many different workflows you need I would use Switch condition after Begin and add type field with the assignment group and then link them to the dedicated workflow there is a similar explanation in docs based on incident and instead of set values you could point it to the assignment group specific workflow.   Switch workflow activity

Hope this helps.