Configuring Change Management
Configuring change management involves the following
steps (for an explanation of what change management is, refer to Change Management):
- Planning
- Determine your
change management approval process
- Decide
the type of Issue(s) that requires an approval process—Decide
what requires approval. Then
decide which fields in an Issue should trigger placing an Issue into the
approval process. For
example, you might have a process for approving expenditures. You
could have a drop-down field that contains different ranges for the cost
of an expenditure, such as "1-500", "501-1000", "1000-5000",
"5000-10000", and "10000+". The
values could be used to determine which process gets that Issue. To
use a different example, for a software change request you might use a
drop-down field that contains values for the degree of difficulty of the
change, such as “Minor”, “Moderate”, and “Significant”. Each
value in the drop-down field could serve as a criterion to trigger placing
the Issue into a different process.
- Decide
what happens to an Issue in a process—Once
an Issue meets the criteria and is submitted to the approval process,
it must pass through one or more "phases". In
a phase, specified "approvers" vote on whether an Issue is approved
or rejected. Action
is then taken upon the Issue based on the results of the vote. There
may be several levels of approval within a process, each level translating
into a different phase. Using
the expenditure example from above, an expenditure of $10,000 or more
might require approval from a manager in one phase and from an upper level
manager in the next phase. A
third phase might be built for a large expenditure for CFO approval. Different
sets of approvers can be specified for each phase.
- Determine who your approvers are for each phase
in the process—These
may be the same approvers for every phase, different approvers, or a combination
of the same and different approvers.
- Decide what constitutes approval or rejection
of a change request—Once
you decide who has to approve the Issue, you have to decide what constitutes
approval and rejection. You
can require unanimous approval or rejection or you can require some percentage
of the voters approve or reject the Issue (e.g., 51% approve or 50% disapprove,
which would mean a majority must approve the Issue but half or fewer of
the approvers could reject the Issue).
- Decide how you want to handle email notification—You can have
emails sent when a phase begins, as a recurring reminder during the phase,
or when a phase ends (i.e., voting has concluded in the phase), or any
combination of these. In
addition, you can include a ballot in the email so that approvers can
vote by replying to the email. If
you want to send recurring reminders, you must decide how frequently a
reminder is sent to someone who has not voted.
- Decide what you want to happen with an Issue
at the end of each phase in the approval process—Determine
what happens to an Issue if it is approved or if it is disapproved. There
are two separate sections for specifying what to do to the Issue at the
end of the phase, depending on whether it is approved or rejected. Fields
within the Issue can be changed, an external program can be run, assignments
can be changed, the Issue can be moved into another approval process and
phase, etc. There
are a variety of options for determining what to do with the Issue once
voting in a phase has concluded.
A good way to understand the approval process
in FootPrints is to read the Create Approval Processes and Create Phases sections of this document
to get a feel for how an Issue is moved through FootPrints
Change Management.