In the event that you require a change to be planned and implemented by another team within NUIT, the best practice is to submit a service request to that team who can then create and own the change ticket as appropriate.
ITSM ‘top tips’
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Category Archives: Change Management
ITSM ‘top tips’
1. NU Service triggers an email notification to change owners (of significant and major changes) when their change has been added to the CAB agenda for review. This email notification is to invite the change owner to attend the CAB meeting at a specified time slot. The subject of this email notification is: “NU Service Notification: Change {Id} has been accepted for CAB review, at time {CABReviewTime}”.
If you have an existing outlook rule set to filter out/re-direct notifications from NU Service then it is recommended that you modify/add a new rule to ensure you have visibility of any CAB invitation email notifications.
2. NUIT Analysts are advised to extend their change planning horizon to facilitate the timeliness of communications associated with their changes.
3. As a reminder ‘Peer Review’ is important to help both change owners and approvers know more about people’s views on the proposal, and is especially important for significant and major changes. Change owners can encourage their peers to submit a peer review within NU Service.
Examples of types of reviewer include:
- Owners of potentially impacted services
- People who can advise on business impact
- Technical reviewers
- Support teams
ITSM ‘top tips’
In the recent inaugural CAB meeting, a few points came up that the group thought might be useful to share with others in NUIT – here are a few ‘top tips’:
- Add a note to change tickets to outline consultations that have taken place, including details of who was consulted, and the outcome
- Include the time it would take to roll back the change in the overall time requested to carry out the deployment.
- There is a need to show a summary implementation plan in the change detail document, but the technical detailed implementation plan (or work instruction) can be held elsewhere. Please make reference to this in the change detail document if it exists.
- Where a change is no longer required, the ticket should be cancelled using the ‘cancel’ action, rather than completed using the ‘record outcome’ action.
NU Service release notes – Tuesday 30th April 2019
Following the successful NU Service release, the re-designed Change Management process is now live. A new Pipeline process is also now available for use.
There have been some minor operational changes implemented for which we have communicated directly with those concerned.
NUIT Change Management
The new process has been developed in collaboration with a Change Management Working Group comprising of members of NUIT, and agreed with the NUIT Leadership Team. It will address concerns about improving change planning, governance, related communications, and visibility of changes and change detail.
The new process introduces a physical Change Advisory Board (CAB) that will meet once a week (usually on a Tuesday) to approve all Significant and Major changes, and will review a selection of other changes and change-related issues.
The first CAB meeting is arranged for Tuesday 14th May, then weekly thereafter. This means that any significant or major changes not set to ‘approved’ in NU Service will have to wait until the first CAB meeting for approval, and should not be deployed before that date.
Any existing open change tickets must be transferred into the new process. To do this, the Change Owner should open the ticket then click the action ‘Transfer to new process’. These change tickets will then be handled under the new process.
Please see the following links for further information and guidance; the tabs on the page contain user guides, process and policy documentation and templates:
https://newcastle.sharepoint.com/hub/itservice/nuitstaffarea/Pages/NUIT-Change-Management.aspx
NUIT Pipeline Management
The new Pipeline process will enable teams to record any proposals or initiatives that are in the early stages of development which can be later progressed via Change management (within NU Service) or Project management (outside of NU Service).
Please see the following links to the SMO share point pages:
Process Document:
https://newcastle.sharepoint.com/hub/itservice/nuitstaffarea/Pages/NUIT-Pipeline-Management.aspx
NU Service User Guide and Tutorial video: https://newcastle.sharepoint.com/hub/itservice/nuitstaffarea/Pages/NU-Service-Pipeline-Management-UserGuide.aspx
Also included in this release:
Workaround – Non-Analyst staff users were previously able to log tickets on behalf of another user via NU Service Self Service. This functionality has been removed for the foreseeable future due to an underlying problem that the SMO will prioritise and investigate. If a staff user needs to log a ticket on behalf of another user, they should contact the IT Service Desk who will add the user on their behalf.
Analysts can still log tickets on behalf of in the normal manner via the analyst NU Service view.
NU Service – Upcoming Release
We are planning to do a release on Tuesday 30th April 2019.
This is an extensive release culminating from a number of months of work, which entails a complete re-design of the Change Management process in the system. The new process has been a collaborative effort and we are grateful to the CM working group and others members of NUIT for their engagement.
The release also includes a new Pipeline process, some system fixes and some minor operational changes that have been pending within our team.
Further details will follow.
Emergency Change process in NU Service
When raising an Emergency Change in NU Service, there are a couple of conditions that need to be met in order for the ticket to progress:
1 . An Emergency Change should have a ‘Level Of Change’ of ‘Significant’ or ‘Major’. Changes logged as ‘Minor’ will not be able to be submitted for approval, as ‘Minor’ changes are self-approved.
Changes marked as ‘Significant’ will have to be approved by the Service Owner. Changes marked as ‘Major’ will be presented to CAB members for approval.
2. An Emergency change must have an entry in the Change Calendar in order for the ticket to progress. to do this, select ‘Add To Change Calendar’ from the actions list.
Next, double click anywhere on the calendar to open the Appointment box, and fill in the relevant details. Click ‘OK’ when finished, then ‘Save and Close’ to get back to the Change ticket.
This will allow the change to be submitted for approval to progress.
If there are any questions or comments about this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Service Process team.
Communicate your changes
If you make significant and/or major changes to a service that underpins other services then it is always a good idea to communicate, especially with the relevant Service Owners and the Service Desk and CRS teams.
With this in mind, the Service Process team recommend that change owners send a short email to the NUIT-All mailing list in advance of implementing a significant or major change that carries the risk of other services suffering impact in the event that the change fails, allowing sufficient time for people to mitigate those risks.
NUIT-All is the most appropriate mailing list since it will reach all service owners, or in their absence a deputy and also reach the first-line service teams.
It is a good idea to standardise the subject line of your email by using the pre-fix “Change Notification: ” – this will facilitate quick identification of such messages for those interested yet also provide a common attribute for those that wish to filter out these messages by setting an appropriate Outlook rule.
Within your email, as well as including the change ticket reference, a brief summary of the change and the date and time of planned implementation, you could consider whether it is also appropriate to say: ‘while it is not anticipated that there will be any interruption to named services, they should be considered at risk during the stated period.’
Finally, please also consider whether there should be outward communications about your planned change (i.e. to customers) – if so, please log a SAMM* request to the IT Service Desk.
Please note that this email notification suggestion is in addition to an appropriate communication plan constructed by the change owner and/or those involved in the change.
*A SAMM is an IT Service Desk news headline that displays on the IT Service website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/news/