Change management approvers and ECAB

[G Balaji]

HI,

I'm new to change mangagement. I did walkthrough youtube videos on Change types and created an emergency change. I have few basic questions on this. I have mentioned my understanding in the points below. Correct me if I'm wrong somewhere on those points. Kindly help me with the answers to understand better.

1. Which role logs the change request and takes it to completion moving across Assess, Authorize, Schedule, Implementa, Review states? I understand ITIL user will be doing this on "New Change request record" after due approvals from CAB or ECAB. 

2. Approvals are defined by workflow and by default, an user from assignment group is an approver in "Assess" state. 

3. For emergency changes, OOTB workflows shows approvers as users from CAB group. Isn't it supposed to be ECAB?

4. Is there any SLAs kind of thing to follow up with the change process. Suppose, if the change request tasks are not implemented in the planned window, is there any notifications being sent to CAB or stakeholders? How are those lapses handled?

Thanks.

[kristenankeny]

With anything in ServiceNow, what they provide is basic framework and some best practices, but most of it can be adjusted to what a business needs.

1) To view and work change requests, ITIL role is needed. But who actually works the ticket really should be determined by the business needs. In our case, for changes that are raised for business services, we are tracking a development group, implementation group, and QA group on each business service (custom fields). We then keep the ticket "assigned to" the dev group while in new or approval states. When it moves to scheduled, it goes to the implementation group. Then when it moves to review we assign it to the QA group. With non-business service changes, we autopopulate the field based on a group on the CI selected, but it's always open to the user to change as needed.

2) The way they handle approvals didn't work for our company because we don't want people to have the ability to have any group approve their changes. Instead, we are using the change_control group on the Business Service or CI for assigning approvals.

3) Again, this really depends on company needs and policy. You can update the workflow to send to an ecab instead if needed.

4) If you needed to notify people that a change is still in "implement" when the planned end hits, then you would want to add in the appropriate "wait" in the workflow that would wait until the planned end and if the change is still in implement (or tasks under are still open), then trigger an event that would trigger a notification. There is nothing OOB to handle work still being done outside the planned window that I've seen.

[G Balaji]

Thanks for the response.