Change management

Effective service desks plan and control changes, and they understand their impact on their business. An Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) change management workflow aims to make your change efforts successful.

The IT Service Desk template comes with a change management workflow. This workflow ensures you record, assess, approve, and implement change requests. We recommend you start with our default workflow and adapt it to your business needs.

If done well, a change management process:

You can lessen risk, outages, and defects. And, you can prevent duplicating efforts from failed changes.

This page describes some best practices for managing changes using Jira Service Desk. You may seek formal training in how to make ITIL recommendation work best for your business.

Change management process

The IT Service Desk template connects certain requests to a change workflow. We set up the workflow to complement the following change management process. Use the workflow to transition change request records alongside these ITIL recommended activities:

We recommend you start with this workflow and adapt it to your needs over time.

The ITIL change management process, in brief:

  1. An internal IT member requests a change. They note details like the affected systems, possible risks, and expected implementation.
  2. The change manager or peers determine if the change will be successful. They may ask for more information in this step.
  3. After review, the team plans how to put the change in place. They record details about:
    • the expected outcomes
    • resources
    • timeline
    • testing
    • ways to roll back the change
  4. Depending on the type of change and risk, a change approval board (CAB) may need to review the plan.
  5. The team works to implement the change, documenting their procedures and results.
  6. The change manager reviews and closes the implemented change. They note whether it was successful, timely, accurately estimated, within budget, and other details.

Jira Service Desk's default change workflow

Using request types, you can associate change requests with an issue type called Change. This puts the issue into the recommended change request workflow.

This workflow follows the basic process above. You can customize it to adapt to the needs of your business.

Customize your change workflow

  1. From your service desk project, select Project settings > Workflows.
  2. Select the edit icon (a pencil), in the entry titled Change Management workflow for Jira Service Desk.
  3. Use the workflow editor to add or remove steps and transitions.

Read more about editing workflows.

Enforce an approval step for change reviews

The change management workflow includes two review stages: a change manager or peer review, and a change advisory board (CAB) review. By default, the template doesn't force approvals for these steps. Any service agent or admin has the right to transition an issue through a review.

You can easily enforce strict approvals, making it mandatory to be reviewed by a one or more specific team members. As an example, here's how to add an approval on the change advisory board review stage in the workflow:

  1. Follow the steps above to customize the Change Management workflow for Jira Service Desk.
  2. Select the AWAITING CAB APPROVAL step in the workflow.
  3. Tick the Add approval checkbox and select Configure.
  4. From the Get approvals from dropdown menu, select CAB.
  5. Select Create.
  6. Publish your workflow.

You can do the same for your change manager or peer reviews. Repeat this process for the Change manager / Peer review stage of the workflow, selecting to get approval from Change managers or your Team.

Designate your approvers

The steps above enforce a review approval, but the issue doesn't know who your approvers are. Designate your approvers in their corresponding issue fields.

For example, to designate your CAB members:

  1. Go to the issue.
  2. Select Edit.
  3. Enter CAB members into the CAB field.

The process is the same for change manager or peer/team reviews.

Depending on how you configure your approvals, all or some of these members need to approve the request before the change can proceed to the Awaiting implementation stage.

You may find your CAB doesn't change membership very often. In this case, you can designate them automatically when setting up a change request type.

  1. In your service desk project, select Project settings > Request types.
  2. Next to change request that you want to add pre-designated CAB approvers to, select Edit fields.
  3. Select Add field.
  4. Tick the checkbox next to CAB and select Apply.
  5. The CAB appears in the list of visible fields. In the CAB entry, select Hide.
  6. Designate your CAB members and select Set.

Similarly, you can pre-designate the change manager or peer reviewers for each request type.