CI selection....help!

[Benson112]

Hi all,

I am currently working on re-writing our change management process and im a little stumped.

Im no amature (SD & Inc, Prob & Chg Practitioner) yet i cant get my head round this!

My question is....what CIs should be selected within a change record? Would you say that only the services the change record relates to should be entered or should you inlude everything which will be affected by the change?

Because our tool isnt capable of selecting a server and it listing all its services / dependacies etc we have to do it manual so the second part of my question is....would you ask users to select Servers or services or both?

Hopw that makes sense. Thanks in advance!

[UKVIKING]

It depends

What is been working on ?

if the server is having work done, then the Primary CI would be the Server being changed.

The services listed for the server being worked on would reflect the impact of the change to be honest

Conversely, if the service was being changed, the service is the CI

Now if the service is the exchange service on the server being upgraded, i would do the work against the server not the service

if the service was Mail and you are changing the service hours or some such a little different
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Benson112]

Thanks very much for your reply!!

I just have one question now.

Example: Server45 requires a replaemenet tape drive and reboot.
Services on Server45: Active Directory, Database x, website y.

So you would be working on the Server yet the service is going to be disrupted, therefore you will need approval from the owners of each service as you are causing disruption.

We select our approvers by CI. i.e. if it is a non impact change we will add the IT owner of the service (we only change manage IT activities! great hey) and if there is impact we would add the IT and business owners of the service.

Now if i have a server with multiple services on it, im going to have multiple business approvers which will not be highlighted by selecting the server CI. (we have the details of the IT and Bussines owners on each service CI).

So following your example the above change would only have the owner of the server on it and not the service owners. This is starting to sound to me like we do things, for want of a better phrase, arse about tit.

hope this is making sense its hard to explain.

[dsemeniuk]

I think you got it right.

If you are updating/changing the Server as you decribe in your example, the RFC should link to that Server CI. You would not link the Services supported by that Server though as you are not changing the Services.

But they are being impacted by this change due to the outage required. You would understand this impact if your CMDB is set up correctly as when you look at the Server CI you are changing, you should be able to see all the relationships associated to that server (applications/systems installed, and digging further into the relationships of those applications/systems you would see the relationships to the actual Services those apps/systems provide).

From there you would understand the impact of making that change and who is all impacted (CI owners) that would need to be notified of the change to get approval.

Make sense?

[UKVIKING]

dsemeniuk got it right

Since the server is being worked on, the primary approver group would be the server management group (infrastructure or system)

But since the work on the server will impact the services which reside on the server, they need to be told as part of the change approval piece

the way I am doing that with my customer's process is

if the service is in hours (SLA) when the work is happening, they get approval capabilities - await explicit yes/no/ik

if the service is out of hours (SLA), the services get notified and they get an implied acknowledgement. They would have to contact change management if they have issues at the next opportune time
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Benson112]

Sorry for the delay in responding people ive been busy with other projects. Now I am back on the change management process I thought I would check back!

Thanks for all your help im kind of getting my head around it now. Because of the way we have been working I couldn’t see the way we SHOULD be working.

So what I have deduced from your replies is:

We select our approvals in the incorrect manner! CIs should simply depict what is being changed and approvers should be determined from the CMDB entry for that CI?

This sounds great...in theory. But we have no CMDB!! Yes yes I know this is fundamental but try telling out execs that. They see it as an un-necessary workload for somebody to initially create and then actively maintain. Don’t get me started!!

So overall I have no way of doing this correctly without a CMDB??

[jpgilles]

[UKVIKING]

benson112

You are in the classic catch-22 situation

To better define the risk and impact of a change on a CI you need to be able to see what services are using the CI

In order to see what services are using what CIs you need some sort of relational database (cmdb) or some sort relational list

you need config mgmt but ....
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Ed]

Hi benson112

JP and John are correct, the dreadful alternative is to rely on 'Experts' which is notoriously dangerous and could lead to a 'single point of failure'.

I am in your situation, and have been struggling to get things right. I can confirm that with Change Management and without a CMDB is actually far better than nothing - not ideal but better.

Just as a small aside, look at the other software you have purchased. e.g. If you have BMCs Service Impact Manager, you also have a copy of their Atrium CMDB. Other vendors may do the same.

Regards

Ed

[Benson112]

Thank you all very much, i have decided (risky as it may seem) that i am sneakily going to create a fasion of a CMDB. I have no alternative but to use excel but i am a wizz with that and have some idea as to how to create the relationships. It may completely fail, it may work "ok" but its got to be better than nothing.

Thanks again all you have helped me no end.