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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
- We are a hosting company and would like to add our customers as an approver to their changes. Buying a user license for each customer is cost prohibitive. Any other suggestions? Frankly, I am surprised more folks do not need this functionality. I would think even an internal IT department would want change approval from a business owner that understands the business impact of the change.
- I actually brought this up in a call I recived from Citrix Qualituy Assurance? The possible "solution" was to BUY a pool of 5 license keys that can be "shared" within the company. Putting aside the fact that the "solution" is still to purchase more licensees, the license is unrestricted, users can see everything a Technician can. The other problem is the release of the license key back into the pool once one person was done with it; if someone forgets to log out (actually click on log out) it holds that license to that user. Another issue is that when users that participated in this send us an email to our support mailbox, because they are setup in Service Desk, the incident is automatically assigned to them, our real IT team never sees these emails in the queue.
Needless to say the requirement is still there and unresolved. - Hi Luke, has there been any progress in the last 2 years that this popular customer request has been open to allow customers to be notified of changes?
- ITIL describes the use of Change Advisory Boards typically populated by non-it personnel.
In order to align properly with the ITIL framework it would make sense to allow for the creation of CAB's as logical objects in GTA.
I would argue that the participation of an employee in a CAB is the extension of ITIL into the business no different than allowing a user to report an incident and therefore should not need to be tied to a licensed account.
But when it comes to GTA so much of the ITIL framework has been watered down to make the product more palatable perhaps strict alignment isn't the goal. - How about gotoassist makes all the customer users free for the work around until the option is released ;-)
- Hi Luke, I would not really say they are the best work arounds as this means we have to pay for extra users or pass these expenses onto our customers. Not really a solution that we are happy to implement.
I would have thought that as changes would be in a customers environment that it would make sense that the customer would be approving the changes not the people making the change.
Also is there a way so the customer can at least see the change? I have assigned but they are still unable to see it. - Hi Jeremy,
There are no further updates on this at the moment. As I mentioned above, we're keeping track of this feature request. At this stage the best workarounds have already been listed in this thread.
Luke - Any updates on this? My company is getting an quite a few CM request and our old system (SharePoint)is not streamlined to keep up. And the powers that be (IT manager) are getting anxious
- I Second David Caranfa's request. We are currently in the middle of looking at the service desk to migrate to. Customer approvals for Change requests would be a big bonus for us. At times we need to schedule server\Application outages for changes and Issues. To be able to have an approval change would be an excellent bonus for both our customers and us.
- Hello. We would like to see this feature and for "customers" (our internal colleagues) to be able to be a part of the change approval process. In our environment, many computer systems have an non-IT owner and the owner needs review and approve change proposals and the results of the change. We have an IT dept of 2 people and would like to run with two licenses, but have a bunch of system owners that need to participate in the change request process including approvals. These approvers would not need any other "user" functionality within the Service Desk. It would be great if we didn't need to purchase full licenses just so someone can review and approve a change request (they don't need to create them).
