The GoTo Community is currently experiencing some technical issues affecting new posts and comments. We are actively working with our service provider and apologize for the frustration.
Forum Discussion
Customer participation in Change/Release Management
I work in the IT department in a company of 250+ users (customers) We have a an internal policy on requesting Software implementation (Change management) or updates/patches (Release Management).
The process flow we have adapted is as follows:
A Change/release request comes from one of our customers.
Certain key Customers are notified of the change/release request based on what it will affect, they enter there notes with any concerns.
A member of the support team then approves the request and then its assigned to a tech to plan out the build.
Once the build is complete and ready for testing, the customer is the one that does the testing and reports back to us.
Techs update the change/release request accordingly and once testing has been completed its pushed into production.
We currently have 5 Service desk accounts for our IT support team and the problem I’ve run into with regards to change/release management is that our customers cant create them, get notifications about them or even see the status. As a result we have to use workarounds like using indecent tickets to track and notify end users, which is not really efficient nor does it flow well in the execution process.
This is a feature my department and I imagine others, would benefit greatly from as we currently have to use SharePoint forms to process these request.
The process flow we have adapted is as follows:
A Change/release request comes from one of our customers.
Certain key Customers are notified of the change/release request based on what it will affect, they enter there notes with any concerns.
A member of the support team then approves the request and then its assigned to a tech to plan out the build.
Once the build is complete and ready for testing, the customer is the one that does the testing and reports back to us.
Techs update the change/release request accordingly and once testing has been completed its pushed into production.
We currently have 5 Service desk accounts for our IT support team and the problem I’ve run into with regards to change/release management is that our customers cant create them, get notifications about them or even see the status. As a result we have to use workarounds like using indecent tickets to track and notify end users, which is not really efficient nor does it flow well in the execution process.
This is a feature my department and I imagine others, would benefit greatly from as we currently have to use SharePoint forms to process these request.
19 Replies
- Fair enough. We have seen people forward the cost of the licenses onto their customers as well, this is particularly handy if they are actively involved in services. But I understand if this is not possible.
We recently added the ability for customers to be associated to Problems, Changes and Releases. This was primarily more for reporting purposes, but it is a step towards eventually allowing customers to have greater involvement with these entities too.
As I mentioned, this is a feature we're currently keeping track of, and are considering adding Changes and Releases to the Portal in the future. We have a few features in the pipeline that might open up additional workarounds. If you come up with any in the interim please let us know :) - Thanks for the reply Luke, the problem with the second option is that we only have 5 licensees, and at any given time the group that handles change/release management can be 3-8 people possibly more. I cant justify the expense of having so many service desk accounts inactive when there are no change/release request going on.
- Thanks for the feedback, we've seen this request come up a few times in the past and have added a +1 against it.
What you're currently doing by using Incidents as a means of communicating back to the customer is one of the workarounds we do suggest.
Here's something else you could try in the meantime. If you have a close relationship with the customer you could potentially create them as a User allowing them to follow all their incidents, problems, changes and releases in their service (if you have your account in such a way that allows them to follow everything within a service). Alternatively you could create them as a Restricted User (see attached screenshot of the permissions when creating a new user), which will allow them to only see Incidents, Problems, Changes and Releases on their watchlist.
