Solving business problems often results in procedural changes. However, changes just as often occur when companies proactively seek business benefits by reducing costs and/or improving services. The goal of the change management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, thus minimizing the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improving the day-to-day operations of the organization. Changes range from small solutions, i.e., upgrading memory or software on a single machine, to large projects, such as an organization–wide system upgrade.
The ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) standard for service and support defines change management as a process that ensures that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to minimize the impact of change-related incidents on service quality. Consequently, change management aims to improve the day-to-day operation of the organization.
The FootPrints Change Manager add-on module enables organizations to develop their own approval process for Issues with no programming. In FootPrints Change Manager, approvers are designated for specific workspaces. When an Issue meets approval criteria, the approvers are notified that an Issue awaits approval. The approvers then give or withhold approval. When an Issue meets approval criteria, it is moved to another stage in the process. Note that meeting "approval criteria" may mean that the Issue is rejected rather than approved.
Workspace administrators can designate different approvers for different stages in the approval process. For example, a proposal for a software change may require an approval in principle for the change from product management, an approval for the design from the development organization, an approval for the actual software build from software development, then a testing approval from quality assurance, and so on. The FootPrints Change Manager feature allows the workspace administrator to create an orderly and efficient method for getting those approvals and ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks or waits too long for review.
Notes
FootPrints Change Manager is an add-on module that incurs an additional cost. The FootPrints Change Manager feature is related to but not to be confused with Change Manager as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library. The FootPrints Change Manager feature provides the ability to manage changes via a voting/approval process.
FootPrints Change Manager is implemented with customized statuses, fields, teams, roles, and escalation rules. The fields and statuses are built into the Change Manager template, a feature of the Workspace wizard for building Change Manager workspaces. The included Change Manager template is a workflow recommendation from BMC, and can be customized as easily as any FootPrints Workspace to reflect the specific needs of the organization.
FootPrints Change Manager provides features that include the following:
For details on configuring FootPrints Change Manager, refer to Configuring FootPrints Change Manager.
For details on using FootPrints Change Manager, refer to Using FootPrints Change Manager.