In the age of technology and AI, deploying risky IT changes that could inadvertently cause outages can be completely avoided. Without a streamlined IT change management process in place, your organization is at risk of insufficiently planned changes entering release, leading to change-led outages.
Utilize visual change workflows for end-to-end change automation backed by powerful AI features—the synergy of no-code/low-code automations and next-gen AI capabilities ensure your IT service desk is set up for change success. Zia's intelligent risk predictions based on historic change data using machine learning and prediction algorithms ensure accurate and proactive change risk calculation—whether they're emergency, standard, or major changes.
Build custom change templates relevant to various change types. Use drag-and-drop fields within your change templates to collect contextual data during change submissions. Make your templates dynamic using form rules, allowing field-level conditionality and automations to tailor your templates to their use cases. With stage specific sections for each change template, you can add data to the template and assign change roles and change advisory boards (CABs).
Streamline change planning with all the right data at your fingertips.
Configure Change Attributes according to your enterprise's change management strategy. Categorize changes according to your business needs under change types. Set up Closure Codes for changes as well as custom stages and statuses as you guide them through automated workflows.
Customize Change Types based on your business needs.
Document comprehensive rollout and backout plans within the change ticket during the planning stage to ensure you are prepared for planned deployment and contingencies.
Formulate impact details as well as rollout and backout plans to minimize your change risk.
Ensure accountability and visibility by assigning Change Roles to users across your organization. Apart from predefined roles, create custom Change Roles with fine-grained access permissions and associate them to named users, whether they're technicians or organization users. This way, your changes are visible to the right stakeholders, with granularly defined access.
Configure CABs to help loop in the right stakeholders for approval, including requesters and technicians. Keep them updated as your changes progress along their life cycle, ensuring enterprise-wide representation in the change process. Pre-approve changes wherever needed to prevent time crunches.
From carrying out standard, scheduled changes to overseeing unexpected, emergency changes, maintaining context is essential to consistent service delivery. ServiceDesk Plus is a unified ITSM platform that helps pull in data from the CMDB, incidents, problems, IT assets, and even previous releases and projects, enabling comprehensive ITSM operations. While planning or implementing changes, you can refer to CMDB relationships to get an integrated view of the IT assets and services impacted by the change.
For example: Network downtime due to a faulty consignment of routers could lead to multiple incident tickets being raised, associated to a problem ticket; if all the routers from the consignment seem to be non-functional, common incidents would be raised. If the IT team decides to cut its losses and switch routers for the affected workforce, that would be logged as a change ticket, with a service request for the routers associated with a purchase order. All of these classes of tickets can be linked with the overall digital transformation project underway at the business.
Manage standard, emergency, and critical changes with separate, unique, and customizable workflows. Each workflow lets you break down changes into eight stages, with customizable statuses within each stage. Built on a drag-and-drop canvas, workflows can automate notifications, approvals, timers, and field updates; invoke custom scripts; trigger APIs to automate contextual actions on third-party applications, and more. With support for multi-path and cross instance orchestration, workflows can revolutionize your change management. You can even associate change templates to preconfigured workflows to trigger a change workflow upon submission.
Ask Zia Workflow Assist is a GenAI-powered workflow builder that enables teams to build powerful ITSM workflows with simple conversational prompts. Let Zia interpret the description of the change workflow, or even a reference image, and generate a corresponding change workflow for you instantaneously. Ask Zia Workflow Assist can understand intricate requirements and interpret images, generate nodes, and troubleshoot workflows by fetching workflow-related help articles from the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud help guide.
You can log change risk values for each change manually based on your proprietary calculations or set up business rules to auto-classify change risk values. You can even build a change risk questionnaire that helps you predict change risks by acquiring data about the change to calculate the risk value.
Leverage predictive intelligence with Zia Change Risk Prediction—trained on historic change ticket data, Zia can identify and predict the most accurate change risk value. This helps you move beyond subjective risk assessment.
Use the Change Calendar to plan changes and releases. Get complete visibility into your change schedule, allowing you to make more informed planning decisions for your IT changes.
Schedule Change Freeze and Maintenance Windows to avoid overwhelming your IT team or risking change-led outages. Schedule freeze windows during holiday seasons, audits, and more, even if they repeat periodically. Schedule maintenance windows when your IT team has planned for it. Both these windows can be restricted to sites, services, or even to all changes, enabling you to control how changes are planned for.
Set up bespoke field-level and form-level automations using Form Rules to make your templates dynamic and adaptive to user inputs. Use condition based automations to tailor the user experience using one single template for a plethora of use cases.
Set up automated time-bound actions, automated contextual notifications to the right stakeholders at different events across the change life cycles and trigger condition-based pre-defined automations.
Setup deadlines for response and resolution times, and escalations both before and after breach using Service Level Agreements(SLAs) in ServiceDesk Plus. Associate SLAs with sites or templates, along with one response based, and upto four resolution based escalations.
To learn more about how ServiceDesk Plus can help you modernize incident management with powerful workflows, talk to a product expert today.
Book your free slotITIL® Change Enablement is the practice of ensuring that necessary organizational changes are assessed, authorized, scheduled, executed, and reviewed efficiently. Its primary purpose is to maximize the number of successful IT changes by reducing risk and minimizing the impact of change-related failures on IT services and, consequently, business operations.
