How change management works in Jira Service Management
Overview
Change management — also known as change enablement — is a service management practice designed to minimize risks and disruptions to IT services while making changes to critical systems and services. A change is adding, modifying, or removing anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.
Common types of changes:
- Standard changes: Pre-approved changes that are low risk, performed frequently, and follow a documented process. For example, adding memory or storage.
- Normal changes: Non-emergency changes that require further review and approval by the Change Advisory Board (CAB), such as upgrading to a new content management system.
- Emergency changes: Changes that arise from an unexpected error or threat that needs to be addressed immediately. Think implementing a security patch or resolving a major incident.
With a collaborative, intuitive, and integrated toolset, Atlassian’s platform can support your transition from traditional change management processes to a modern change management practice. By using one platform for IT and software development, you can begin bridging the gap between ITSM and DevOps. You can accelerate software delivery while managing risk and maintaining compliance.
- Jira Service Management eases the intake of changes with an intuitive service desk and automation for risk assessment and approval routing. Reduce the downstream effects of changes with service configuration management for better visibility into the dependencies between services and infrastructure.
- Streamline workflows by integrating Jira Service Management with CI/CD tools, including Bitbucket. Once code is deployed, a change request is created and risk is automatically assessed. If required, the change is flagged for additional review.
- Use Confluence for cross-functional planning, templates for change plans, and peer reviews. This reduces the reliance on a formal CAB process, as relevant teams can now collaborate and gain visibility from a shared source of truth.
- Finally, link Jira Service Management change requests directly to Jira Software for visibility and tracking of software-related work.
The change management process
For nimble, high-velocity teams, the change management process is shifting away from lengthy reviews and non-technical stakeholder approvals and toward automated, collaborative processes between IT and development teams that increase agility while still balancing risk.
Here is a basic overview of a change management process:
- Change request - Someone requests a change and includes notes on possible risks, expected implementation, and affected systems.
- Change request review - A change manager or peer reviewer reviews the initial change request. How likely is it to be successful? Are the risks and rewards accurate? Is it worth making?
- Change plan - The team creates a game plan for the change. They document expected outcomes, resources, timeline, testing requirements, and ways to roll back the change if needed.
- Change approval -The appropriate change manager, peer reviewer, or CAB reviews the plan and approves the change.
- Change implementation -The team ships the change, documenting procedures and results along the way.
- Change closure - When appropriate, the change manager reviews and closes the change when appropriate. Their report should communicate whether the change was successful, timely, accurately estimated, within budget, etc.
For more information, check out our Change Management page.
How to get started with change management in Jira Service Management
Use the native change management workflow
Your IT service project template in Jira Service Management comes with a change management workflow. This workflow ensures you record, assess, approve, and implement change requests. We recommend that you start with your service project’s default workflow and adapt it to suit your business needs. Read more about editing workflows.
Additionally, by default, we include the following fields in your agent's view of a change request. These fields are based on the Change issue type. If needed, you can add custom fields as well.
Set up enforced approvals
By default, any agent or admin has permission to transition an issue through a review stage. You can, however, enforce approvals, making it mandatory for a change issue to be reviewed by one or more specific team members. Jira Service Management supports approvals from both individual users and groups of users in Jira.
To require approval for a request, you’ll need to make sure the right fields are available and add an approval step to the relevant workflow status.
- Use the default individual/group approval fields or create fields for entering approvers
- Add the approval step to a workflow status
Auto-approve standard changes
The IT service project template comes with an automation rule that preapproves change requests that have the Change type set to Standard.
You can disable or fine-tune this rule in your automation settings:
- From your service project sidebar, select Project settings > Automation.
- Edit the rule named Auto-approve standard change requests.
Schedule changes with the change calendar
The change calendar in Jira Service Management allows your team to schedule and view changes that are happening, reduce risk, and streamline your change management processes.
From the navigation on the left, select Change calendar to see the calendar. From here, you can:
- See an overview of your scheduled change requests by day, week, or month
- Select a time in the calendar to create a new change request
- View or edit the details of existing change requests
- Filter change requests on the calendar by service project, status, and affected service
Change management best practices and tips
Embrace practices to make standard change the new normal
For many IT teams, the bulk of changes are considered “normal changes,” which require longer lead times for initiating, planning, and approving the change. Consider shrinking your backlog of changes by identifying and moving changes into a standard change path. For example, reviewing the most common changes can help teams discover changes that can be preapproved and automated through a standard change path. This can help improve the speed of the majority of change requests while freeing up time to prioritize improvements for the remaining normal changes.
Streamline change request intake for IT, developer, and business teams
With a self-service portal for IT, software, and business teams, Jira Service Management offers a convenient way to intake infrastructure change requests. In this example, IT staff can easily choose from various change request types, such as pre-approved maintenance updates, or production system upgrades requiring further planning and review.
Adopt an automated risk model for changes
The request form in Jira Service Management allows you to configure the questions and data needed to properly assess the risk of a change. Based on the responses, automation in Jira Service Management can be used to calculate the level of risk of each change request and set the appropriate risk value.
You can also use automation to:
- Classify a change request as ‘standard,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘emergency,’ or by service tier and dependencies
- Route change requests down the right Jira workflow path, such as pre-approvals for standard changes and additional workflows for high-risk normal changes
- Notify assigned stakeholders about high-risk changes which require further review
Create change requests automatically from your CI/CD tools
By integrating Jira Service Management with CI/CD tools, such as Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, and CircleCI, developers now have a streamlined change management process right in their existing workflows. Changes are automatically registered as requests in Jira Service Management, and a complete audit trail of changes deployed to production is possible.
Jira Service Management automatically pulls in the relevant information — such as change details directly from the CI/CD tool, impacted services, the change risk score, and change approvers — right in the change request. Change managers have all the context they need to approve changes or request additional review. Your developers can also track the progress of the request, right from their CI/CD tool such as Bitbucket.
Break down complex changes into smaller units of work
By deconstructing complex changes into smaller units of work, teams can more easily control smaller changes, move them faster through the change process, and reduce the level of risk. Confluence brings IT, staff, and stakeholders together around complex work. They can create change documents as a team, provide peer review and feedback, and iterate in real-time until the change is implemented.
In this following example, a team has broken down a major change into smaller tasks and pre-changes. They can create Jira issues, stories, tasks, and changes right from the Confluence page, and add links to the change request for ease of tracking. Confluence allows teams to turn real-time collaboration into actionable work with ease.
Unlock learning with change metrics and KPIs
To measure and learn from your changes, Jira Service Management provides out-of-the-box reports, along with the ability to build and share custom dashboards. Use Jira Service Management as a source of truth to bring together data across your changes, incidents, services, and code.
When measuring your change enablement performance, focus on metrics that unlock learning and improvements, such as:
- Are changes realized in a timely and effective manner?
- What is the impact of changes to services?
- Are we meeting change-related governance and compliance requirements?
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