Classifying Changes

Effective Change Enablement involves the proper processing of requests for change. Usually, a change is driven by a configuration item that has been identified in need of a change. The configuration item is usually the purpose for a change.

Sometimes a graphical representation of the personnel, organization structure, and equipment can determine how a change can affect the organization. See Working with the CI Map.

Standard change templates are used for preapproved standardized types of changes. These changes bypass the approval process. Change Managers, however, always have the option of classifying some standard changes as major or emergency, thereby making the change go through an approval process.

After a non-standard change has been requested, the Change Manager assesses the risk, the impact, the cost, and other factors that determine whether the change is feasible or not.

After a change goes into the requested status, the Change Manager can decide whether the change should go forward, get deferred, or denied. The Change Manager can determine the risk associated with the change (see Setting the Risk Level for a Change). The Change Manager can also view the CI map for a visual of the services that may be impacted by or impact the change.

Changing Urgency, Impact, and Priority

Change Managers can prioritize the change based on urgency and impact. By default, Service Manager prioritizes change requests based on the following:

•Impact: The extent to which the loss of service will impact the business organization. For example, if a single application is down, it will have less business impact than a server being down.

•Urgency: The affected user's tolerance for a delay in the resolution. Urgency is usually time-related. For example, the loss of the Sales department's network printer before the end of the fiscal quarter might be assigned a greater urgency than at another time.

•Priority: The order in which it needs to be resolved, based on the impact and urgency.

The default priority values are calculated as follows:

		URGENCY
		High	Medium	Low
IMPACT	High	1	2	3
	Medium	2	3	4
	Low	3	4	5

The priority is automatically calculated by the application and appears in the change record:

Change Urgency and Impact

Change Type Fields

Based on ITIL Change Enablement categories, Service Managers allow Change Managers to categorize changes as follows:

Category	Description
Minor	Small changes that have a minor impact on the organization.
Emergency	Urgent changes that must be made. Emergency changes are typically implemented first and created after the change has been made due to the urgent nature of the change. As a result, emergency changes are typically posted to the calendar after the change has been made for auditing purposes.
Major	These changes usually consist of a great number of items or dependencies and can also lead to other associated change requests.
Significant	These changes have a large significant impact on the organization.
Standard	These changes are routine, understood, and generally accepted that the entire organization understands as necessary for normal operations. As a result, the approval board does not need to meet and accept a standard change. Changes of this type are generally performed on a regular basis and are preapproved. Some of the changes that are created from a service request fall into this category. The customer is already entitled to the service, so approval is not necessary.