Change Management use case

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Change Management use case

    The Change Management use case within IT Service Management (ITSM) focuses on improving incident resolution and minimizing outages through effective data management. Utilizing the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) framework enhances understanding of change impacts on services and efficiently routes change requests.

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    Key Features

    • Impact Analysis: Users can assess how changes affect services and service offerings.
    • Dynamic Routing: Change Management automatically routes changes and notifies affected services to facilitate approval.
    • Service Subscriptions: Related lists help identify users and groups impacted by outages based on their subscriptions.
    • Business and Technical Service Offerings: These offerings enable identification of approvers and assist in change routing.
    • Environment Management: The application service attribute distinguishes between production and non-production environments.

    Key Outcomes

    Implementing the CSDM framework provides context for changes by linking configuration items (CIs) to the services affected. To utilize the Change Request form effectively:

    • Populate the Configuration Item attribute with the target CI to aid in change routing.
    • Use the Impacted Services related list to identify all relevant services.
    • Optionally, specify provider services and identify additional affected CIs.

    Dynamic population of the Affected CI list requires configuration beyond the base system. For further guidance, refer to the video on how Change Management leverages the CSDM.

    For ITSM, specifically incident and change, identifying the location of critical data can help reduce mean time to resolve incidents and eliminate outages caused by change.

    Key features of the Change Management use case

    Applying the CSDM framework provides value to Change Management in the following ways:
    • Enables users to understand the impact of a change on services and service offerings.
    • Changes are dynamically routed.
    • Change Management identifies and notifies all affected services to support the approval decision.

    Data elements available for use by Change Management.
    1. Subscription: Related lists on service offerings that identify who has access to the offering and thus may be impacted in an outage. An incident or change can identify impact using the subscribed by tables. The related lists are as follows:
      • Service Subscriptions by Company [service_subscribe_company]
      • Service Subscriptions by Department [service_subscribe_department]
      • Service Subscriptions by Group [service_subscribe_sys_user_grp]
      • Service Subscriptions by Location [service_subscribe_location]
      • Service Subscriptions by User [service_subscribe_sys_user]
    2. Business service offering may be used to provide the business approver based on approval_group and business_criticality. A business service may have multiple offerings, each with a different criticality.
    3. Technical service offering may be used to provide the technical approver approval_group and technical assignment group on the attribute assignment_group. May be used by change for routing of change and change tasks. May be synchronized onto the CI’s that the offerings manage thus reducing the manual overhead of maintaining manual data on thousands/millions of CI’s.
    4. Application service may be used to provide prod and non-prod (DEV, QA, UAT, etc.) environments. Non-prod environments may be filtered out if desired. The legacy used_for attribute maps to the environment attribute. You should use the environment attribute.
      Note:
      Some service offerings may identify the environment of the offering as well.

    Results of the Change Management use case

    The CSDM framework provides context for the changes. The context includes the CIs involved in the change and the services affected.

    Use the Change Request form to see the impact of the change. Complete the following steps:
    1. Populate the Configuration Item attribute [configuration_item] with the target CI for the change activity. You can then use this CI to identify details for change routing. For example, you can use the CI data, such as “Assignment Group” or "Approval Group," and provide information about the service impact by using dependency relationships.
    2. Populate the Impacted Services related list [task_cmdb_ci_service] with the services that are related to the populated CI. These may include services and service offerings.
    3. (Optional) Use the Service and Service Offering attributes to identify the provider services responsible for managing the selected CIs.
    4. (Optional) Use the Affected CI related list [task_ci] to identify the CIs that may have caused the change. These CIs are in addition to the CIs previously populated. The [task_ci] table can be populated dynamically or manually.
      Note:
      Dynamic population is not part of the base system. To use dynamic population, you need to configure the Change Request form.

    For more information

    See the video: How Change Management leverages the CSDM