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How do you ensure that pre-approved changes are indeed pre-approved and not being selected to skip approvals? I know actions that can be manually done to prevent this but I want to enable change implementers to use pre-approved changes more effectively. 

My initial thought was to have a business rule that forces a change template is selected/required on submitting the change request but there other benefits to using templates outside of pre-approval and doesn’t really fix the change process avoidance issue.

How are you doing this at your organization? We tend to align with ITIL where possible but has been a 2 year journey thus far. 

Thanks in advance. 

Your thought on a business rule for change is the way I have approached this.   

 

Technician puts in a change request for us this is L2 or higher. We have the change templates they can apply if needed. We have several different rules to force validation depending on who initiated the change.
 

IE: If I place a change request in the system as a director and set it to “EMERGENCY” there are are no approvals set. The working thought for me is, I as the director can make that call and declare this an emergency based on my rules of engagement with the business.   (System Down / Severely Impacted / Security Incident). Other wise my changes have an approval as well with members of the business.

Side note: the business users get two attempts to work with me to schedule a change. If they are being difficult, the third attempt is not negotiated but forced upon them.  🙂 Live must go on and problems must get fixed. :)  But this is a known for them so I have not had to resort to this yet….

I think this may work in select scenarios but our use case includes this validation for all including SVP of IT. We need a way to validate the pre-approved change type is actually pre-approved. 

 

So here is what I have done:

  • limited template creation to freshservice admins
  • created a service item to request a template be created - including incident/requests
  • request and receive approval from CAB on the pre-approved change template
  • build the template and make it available to those who need it
  • When a template is selected that is pre-approved or if they select a pre-approved change type it will
    • hide-all fields except subject, description, and agent
    • ***I wish I could hide AND mandate fields**** this would allow me to force a template to be selected 
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