Managing changes with your IT service project

Effective service teams plan and control changes, as they understand their impact to their business. Although Jira Service Management provides default change management workflows and fields, we’ve now updated them to better follow the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. We’ve also added a few additional steps that will let you create an inventory of assets and open changes against them by using the built-in asset management functionality.

Learn more about ITIL and change management

If you’re not familiar with the ITIL best practices, check out our resources. They’ll explain you the basic concepts, definitions, and processes. Learn more about change management

Set up change management in Jira Service Management

Have a look at the list of customizations we’ve made to the change management process. If you’d like to use them, you’ll need to adjust your individual projects manually.


Change management workflow

The workflow follows the ITIL best practices and terminology, and makes sure your changes are approved and accounted for. Extra steps let you properly plan and assess the most important and risky changes, at the same time not slowing down critical changes that must be implemented right away. All this with the right stakeholders sharing their expertise and approving your changes along the way.

Different types of changes using different workflow paths

Thanks to automation rules, different types of changes can take different paths. Just so emergency changes don’t have to wait for all of the approvals – they’re emergencies after all.

EMERGENCY

An emergency change must be assessed and implemented as quickly as possible. Such a change omits a few workflow steps and goes right into implementation.

STANDARD

A standard change occurs frequently, is low risk, and has a pre-established procedure with documented tasks for completion. It needs less planning and fewer approvals.

NORMAL

A normal change requires an important change to a service or infrastructure, but you might not have a well established process for it. It’s good to properly plan and assess it.




Automation rules handling repetitive tasks for you

Automation rules will also take some burden off your back and automate repetitive tasks, just so you don’t have to think about them:

  • Determine change risk based on the importance of affected asets

  • Calculate priority based on Impact and Urgency

  • Escalate Emergency changes

  • Auto-approve Standard changes


Change plans

With custom fields, each change requests can store detailed plans, just to make sure everyone working on it knows what they’re doing or can quickly roll back if it turns out they don’t.

  • Implementation plan

  • Test plan

  • Backout plan

Inventory of assets and configuration items

Jira Service Management lets you create an inventory of assets and configuration items, together with their details and relations between them. You can then open changes against these assets and get them linked together. Thanks to that, details about an asset are included in the change request and everyone involved has enough context to decide how risky or important a change is.


Selecting an asset

Viewing an asset

Viewing more details


Approvals from the right stakeholders

Make sure the most important and risky changes are approved by the right people. You can include change managers, CAB, and approvers that are directly responsible for your assets – the right people at the right time. By using Insight custom fields, these approvers will change dynamically depending on the asset affected by your change request.

  • Change managers (user picker field)

  • Change Advisory Board (user picker field)

  • Owners of your Insight assets (Insight field)

Get started with improved change management

To get started, follow these steps. They’ll help you adjust your projects to all of these changes and provide some explanations about what these changes do:

Last modified on Oct 19, 2021

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