Approving, Scheduling, and Implementing Changes

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Introduction

Once a Change has been assessed and accepted it may require a prescribed business process to be followed which may involve approvals, scheduling, and tasks. All of this can be orchestrated using the Business Process Engine. The complexity of the underlying change process can be shielded from the change users, and instead a graphical Head's Up Display can represent the Processes stages, tasks, authorisations, and milestones.

Approvals

Changes can include multiple approval stages in a single underlying Change Process. Approval stages can be configured using the Business Process Engine and the Authorisation node.

• Each Authorisation gate can be configured with the required approvers which can be named co-workers, or variables such as Request Owner or Customers Manager.
• Approvals can require a unanimous outcome, or each approver can be attributed a weighting, and a weighting can be set to approve or reject the request.
• Authorisation outcomes:

• Approved
• Rejected
• Expired - Define how long the Authorisation window is available for, if no other outcome has been made, the Authorisation can be set to expire.

• Branching can be configured based on each possible outcome, and this could include a delegate authorisation point in the event of an Expired outcome.
• Reasons for Approval or Rejecting can be made mandatory if required.

Scheduling

Changes can be scheduled manually using the Schedule action bar option on the Change record. Using the business process engine, the underlying Change process can be Suspended Pending Scheduling which will take the Change record in context to the Schedule action option, and will wait for the Change to be scheduled before the Change process resumes.

Once a Change is scheduled it will appear on the Forward Schedule of Change calendar.

Forward Schedule of Calendar

In Service Manager if you have at least the Change Calendar Viewer role, you can review scheduled change in the change calendar by:-

1. On the navigation bar select Service Desk and then 'Change calendar'
2. The default view is the current month. Today’s date is highlighted along with any changes scheduled by day
3. Each change can be reviewed by selecting it and drilling down into the change record.
4. You can change the view to by week or day and scroll between those periods using the ‘<’ or ’>’ buttons