Acting as Change Controller

A change is normally submitted for approval after its implementation plan has been finalized. This ensures that an approver only needs to complete one approval task to provide approval for both the objective of the change, as well as its implementation plan and implementation timing.

Because most organizations have multiple change managers, each planning their changes without considering the planned changes of other change managers, there is typically one person who checks for conflicts between changes and other planned events (e.g. outages planned by the power company). This person is usually also responsible for ensuring that changes do not conflict with internal standards or policies and that the risk & impact analysis that has been performed is adequate.

Howard Tanner fulfills this role at the Widget Data Center where they have called this the “Change Controller” role. Howard is the manager of the Operations team and also the IT Manager, so he is aware of what is going on at the Widget Data Center. This makes it easy for him to spot conflicts between changes and other planned events. He is also very much aware of the internal standards and policies, and he has the authority to tell change managers to do a better job at the risk & impact analysis when this is necessary.

Sign out as Barney Turban and log in again as Howard Tanner.

The next task of the change workflow that was created by Barney Turban is an approval task that is assigned to Howard Tanner (the change controller) and Jo-Ann Stock (the owner of the Windows Server service). Go to the inbox and check the approval task.

A change controller will use the Change Calendar to verify when changes are planned and if there is a conflict with other changes. You can access the Change Calendar via an option in the Actions Menu (Gear in the top header bar) or via the Analytics console (4th icon in the top header bar) where you will find the Change Calendar as a menu item in the left pane. Verify the Change Calendar: the implementation task “Put change into production” should be visible now.

A change becomes visible in the Change Calendar when an implementation task of the change is linked to a Service Instance. 

Let’s assume that a special event is planned on Sunday, so Howard decides to reject the change for the following reason:

This Sunday the annual marathon will take place. Its route will go right past the data center, so it will be difficult to access the building. It would be better to delay this change until the following Sunday.

Go to the inbox and reject Howard’s approval task using this information.

Questions:

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