Change Management templates and activities

Mina_Saidi

Hi Team, 

We are currently outlining our change management processes and i have been asked to investigate if the portal can create the below

- one change management template ( to be named Change Request)
- Change Request template to have 4 change types (created as a list I'm guessing) changes type are Normal Change (BAU), Standard Minor, Standard Major, Emergency/Urgent Change
- each change type needs to have its own review activities, seperate approvers etc. 

My question is, is it at all possible to have seperate activities generated for a drop down list within the one template? 

if someone goes in and selects standard change it generates the relevant approvers and if they amend the change type (within the same template) it selects the appropriate activities? or does it mean i will need to create 4 seperate templates?

if i need to crate 4 seperate templates is it possible to have a "duplicate or copy/paste" option? in the scenario that the change initiator uses the wrong template? to avoid the scenario of the initiator having to redo all the work, they can simple copy and paste the details from one template to another?

hopefully that makes sense.

Thank you for your help. 

Kind Regards

Patrick_Chambers

@Mina_Saidi

Yes, it is possible leveraging Orchestrator.

However, you could create a template for each one of these change types and then create a standard template. Then you could create a workflow to apply the specific template based on certain criteria.

Example: If the title or CR class extension(enum)  contains “Normal” apply the Normal Change template 

Now you should be able to create a CR from standard template and based on that criteria it will apply specific template with relevant Activities, Reviewers, etc.

Mina_Saidi

Thanks @Patrick_Chambers that was very helpful

one other question, im not very good with writing up code/workflow,here will that go? in the service management database in SQL studio or custom space, or management pack?

thanks

Tom_Hendricks

Patrick_Chambers said:

@Mina_Saidi

Yes, you can determine which templates are available via scoping in the user security roles.

This is 100% accurate of course, but might potentially present issues depending on exactly which templates you do not want to see in the template list.  This may not apply to you, but I feel like it deserves a mention in this conversation, just in case.

For example, if you have templates that have automation runbooks in them that depend on certain user input to run properly and you therefore only want them to be used by service catalog forms, removing them from the user's scope means that they cannot be used by the catalog form (for that user) and the form will fail.  If you wish to selectively hide templates that the users need have access to, that requires some custom code, unfortunately.

This comment thread shows how to move templates in and out of scope, but also shows how to apply a custom filter if that is needed.

Tom_Hendricks

This is something I raised several years ago, but there is no /ChangeRequest/New/ page, without a template.  Or to say the same thing another way, Change Requests cannot be blank, they always require a template to be specified, and there is no default, for some reason.

I have a couple lines of JS to redirect /ChangeRequest/New/ to /ChangeRequest/New/<<GUID for my "default" template here>> since a number of my users decided to be clever and type this "new" URL into the address bar because they didn't like the selection of templates.

It's hard to blame them for trying this, honestly.  One would think that doing this would either prompt you for a template on page load or load a default, but neither is the case.  Last time I tested this (somewhere around v7--it has been a while), it actually loaded an incident template onto the new CR for some reason and had the kind of disastrous result you might expect from this.

As for hiding the templates, your code above doesn't look much like mine.  I use reverse logic where in order for a template not to get removed, it must contain one of a few approved prefixes.  My array then only contains the first few characters of "allowable" templates, and the loop at the bottom just tests for those characters at the start.  Without being able to test this, I suspect it may be failing on an exact match of the entire name, and you may be getting leading/trailing spaces that cause it not to match, for example.  This is just a guess of course.

Did you grab the latest/most recent code from that other thread I linked to?  I had provided a version and IIRC @Brian_Wiest has one more similar to what you are showing here just a few posts earlier than mine, which you may prefer.

Patrick_Chambers

@Mina_Saidi

Yes, it is possible leveraging Orchestrator.

However, you could create a template for each one of these change types and then create a standard template. Then you could create a workflow to apply the specific template based on certain criteria.

Example: If the title or CR class extension(enum)  contains “Normal” apply the Normal Change template 

Now you should be able to create a CR from standard template and based on that criteria it will apply specific template with relevant Activities, Reviewers, etc.

Mina_Saidi

Thanks @Patrick_Chambers that was very helpful

one other question, im not very good with writing up code/workflow,here will that go? in the service management database in SQL studio or custom space, or management pack?

thanks

Patrick_Chambers

@Mina_Saidi

You can create a workflow in the service manager console under Administration > Workflows > Configuration.

Here is an example for an incident workflow.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center/scsm/workflows?view=sc-sm-1807

Mina_Saidi

oh wow. awesome. thank you. you have been great.

Kind Regards

Mina_Saidi

hi @Patrick_Chambers 

I have one other question, is it possible to hide the other templates from the +NEW open on the bottom bar? so only the main "change request template" appears and the others are in the background to only apply if the certain options are triggered?

Kind REgards

Patrick_Chambers

@Mina_Saidi

Yes, you can determine which templates are available via scoping in the user security roles.

Tom_Hendricks

Patrick_Chambers said:

@Mina_Saidi

Yes, you can determine which templates are available via scoping in the user security roles.

This is 100% accurate of course, but might potentially present issues depending on exactly which templates you do not want to see in the template list.  This may not apply to you, but I feel like it deserves a mention in this conversation, just in case.

For example, if you have templates that have automation runbooks in them that depend on certain user input to run properly and you therefore only want them to be used by service catalog forms, removing them from the user's scope means that they cannot be used by the catalog form (for that user) and the form will fail.  If you wish to selectively hide templates that the users need have access to, that requires some custom code, unfortunately.

This comment thread shows how to move templates in and out of scope, but also shows how to apply a custom filter if that is needed.

Mina_Saidi

Hi,

thanks for that. i have tried to do this but it isnt working for me.

I have added the code in my custom space but the templates still appear in the bottom bar.

i also dont get the option to create NEW Service Request, i just get From template. but for SR and IR i do get the options. i have added screenshots just to show it clearer.

I have gone into admin settings but i cant find where i need to enable that.

any ideas? and Im guessing Im missing something in the code.

Mina_Saidi

when i select "change Request" i just want it to launch into a blank change request form which i have created in the console.

when i select incident, it gives new incident and it launches into the generic incident form. but for change request it only gives "from template" option and it provides a whole list of templates that i want hide.

Tom_Hendricks

This is something I raised several years ago, but there is no /ChangeRequest/New/ page, without a template.  Or to say the same thing another way, Change Requests cannot be blank, they always require a template to be specified, and there is no default, for some reason.

I have a couple lines of JS to redirect /ChangeRequest/New/ to /ChangeRequest/New/<<GUID for my "default" template here>> since a number of my users decided to be clever and type this "new" URL into the address bar because they didn't like the selection of templates.

It's hard to blame them for trying this, honestly.  One would think that doing this would either prompt you for a template on page load or load a default, but neither is the case.  Last time I tested this (somewhere around v7--it has been a while), it actually loaded an incident template onto the new CR for some reason and had the kind of disastrous result you might expect from this.

As for hiding the templates, your code above doesn't look much like mine.  I use reverse logic where in order for a template not to get removed, it must contain one of a few approved prefixes.  My array then only contains the first few characters of "allowable" templates, and the loop at the bottom just tests for those characters at the start.  Without being able to test this, I suspect it may be failing on an exact match of the entire name, and you may be getting leading/trailing spaces that cause it not to match, for example.  This is just a guess of course.

Did you grab the latest/most recent code from that other thread I linked to?  I had provided a version and IIRC @Brian_Wiest has one more similar to what you are showing here just a few posts earlier than mine, which you may prefer.

Mina_Saidi

Thanks Tom, i used your code and added my prefixes in correctly and it works.

Thank you so much.