Change Management Tool

[ueuniverse]

Has anyone used or using Rational ClearQuest for their change management process?

I am having a lot of trouble getting people to use this tool.

Any tutorial or idea will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,

[Guerino1]

Hello Ueuniverse,

We know of one very large financial enterprise that tried to use it for Change Management through an abstraction layer called CMxtra but in the end they abandoned using it for broad scale ChM. They now only use it as an Issue Tracking (in other words a limited Problem Management tool) for software development, since it can be coupled to ClearCase. We know that their developers hate the CMxtra layer, thinking it clunky and very difficult to use or understand.

They now use Remedy for broad scale ChM and they've voiced that they are very unhappy with it and, as a result, are currently on the look out for replacement options that meet their needs, which is why they're speaking with us.

Other than this, we don't know of a single organization that has attempted to use it for ChM. It doesn't mean there aren't any. It simply means we just haven't come across any others.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
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[Edited by Admin to remove link]

[walter349]

We currently use Remedy for Change management, but it is not very intuitive and if the initial fields are not used in the correct order, then it wipes every detail you have entered. including the change detail.

The order of use is not really obvious and becomes a habit of use rather than being an obvious progression from one to another.

I have learned to detail everything in a word document first and then paste it in later.

One of the big problems I have is change approvers, approving changes without actually reading the change detail and therefore making configuration settings that differ to those detailed in the change, without updating the change record.

We also use the change document as work order, so that the engineer performing the change has a ordered set of steps and instructions to follow and check off on.

[Ed]

[peppermint]

I don't think Rational ClearQuest was designed to be a Change Management system, it's a software developement tool, shoud be interfaced with the change management tool in the company, but in some ways it does much more than managing changes, and in some ways it does much less, in other words it has a completely different focus. With another example, Remedy has a product, Quality Management, which covers every aspect of software developement, but it's not wise to use it for change management, since where would put your changes then which are not software related changes?!

Hope this helped,

pep

[GregWallace]

it's an open source ccm tool for Linux and Solaris servers. www.netdirector.org

It has role-based permissions to segregate duties and an embedded database that keeps track of all changes by user, what they did, etc and allows easy rollback.

one thing it's missing is really good support for tiered change processes. we've been asled for it, but it's not there yet. what it does have in this regard,is a a change scheduling process - so, an Admin can go into Apache, let's say, make a config. change and then schedule that change to occur anytime in the future, say in a week. Then the change approver can go in and review the proposed change and accept or reject it.

Prob. wouldn't be too hard to tweak the tool so that the ability to apply a change immediately would be removed for everyone except approvers...

Greg