Change Management and MS Windows Updates....

[DrewW]

So I am looking for some input on how people are using change management when it comes to MS Windows updates. Our process is paper still for this. Currently we have 280 different times when updates are installed on the 1000+ servers over the span of 4 weeks. We would like to automate the whole part of filling the changes since Server Y will always be the 2 Wednesday of the month so figuring out which servers need to go on a change for one week should not be two difficult.

I am thinking Have one "Master" change request and 280 child change requests. The reason for this is that each group is at a different time and the people who need to be notified are different for each group. We also need to be able to cancel a particular group if need be and I figured that this mite be an easy way for that to happen. Eventually we want to integrate with our patching product.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance...
Drew

[tony_fugere]

I like your approach and would also consider Release Management to track these. That may or may not be applicable in your scope.

I've helped many clients implement change in a manner that follows a similar parent-child relationship as you describe here with success. You could even automate it with workflow to take the affected CI's list of the Master to generate 280+ child CHG's with a Run Script activity. The process could be:

1. Create the master and identify all Affected CI's
2. Click Submit for Approval to trigger workflow
3. Workflow sees the Change Request needs to generate child CHG's (maybe a flag on the master to denote this?)

[DrewW]

Nice to know that someone else has done this the same way that I am planning.

I had not thought of the release management idea though. I will have to look at that.

Thank you for the thoughts.