Change Process Questions...

[scott_freitas]

We are in the implementation stages of Change Management on the ServiceNow platform and we have a few questions about change processes which we are evaluating as part of the implementation efforts.   Any help or suggestions with what your companies are doing around these topics would be greatly appreciated.

Does your organization require pre-approvals before emergency changes can be done?   If so, what process do you have to make sure the CMO can do the approvals prior to the change being done?

Does your process support "standard" changes at anytime, including critical business hours or are "standard" changes still only done in appropriate windows but just require less active approvals?

If a change to a critical service, which has the most restrictive change window, is determined to be "Non-Disruptive" due to the service being highly available and highly redundant, does your process allow for it to be done in a less restrictive window?

Thank you in advance for any assistance with these questions.

[David OBrien]

Scott,

It looks like this post is a bit old so don't know if you're still looking for answers but I'll try and provide some guidance here.

For emergency changes, it varies between organizations but typically what I see with my customers is that there is usually some sort of verbal approval done before the emergency change goes into place (often times more of a notificaiton of 'this change is happening' than truely an approval) and then the Change Request record actually gets created after the change has been implemented.   Then as part of the actual closeout of the change request it gets reviewed by the change management office or change advisory board to know why it happened and was an emergency.

For Standard changes I generally see them still following guidelines of scheduled downtimes or maintenance windows but just requiring less approval. Most of the time I see either no approval or a single approval from the Assigned To's manager, Assignment Group manager, or CI owner.

For changes to critical services with restrictive change windows I would lean towards keeping them in the maintenance windows because even if it's not expected to be disruptive, there is always a possibility of disruption if something unexpected happens.

[scott_freitas]

I really appreciate the response David!   That is pretty much in line with what we were planning.

[Jogen]

Hi Scott,

Firstly the Emergency Type Changes are created after that you can do an email approval of the Emergency Change mentioning the Change number and Why it is necessary with a suitable template and after the Change is email approved the Changes can be moved.

The Change with Type Emergency is approved by the Change App-rover and Closed them.

For Standard: You can follow the organisation approval rules by adding different levels of approvers. Technical at the first and business/change manager at second.

--Jogen