Change management

SECURITY  Edit Ticket permissions (Change Management must be enabled)

NAVIGATION  Create > Service Desk > Ticket, and multiple additional places throughout Autotask

NOTE  This feature is not included with an Essentials Autotask contract. Please contact your Kaseya Account Manager.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN  This feature may be hidden in your Autotask instance because it is not activated. If so, you can activate it on the > Admin > Admin Categories > Activations page. Refer to Activations.

The primary objective of change management is to control and enable beneficial changes with minimum disruption to service delivery. The Change Management feature allows you to track and manage change requests, approvals, and any associated problems or incidents (see Working with problem and incident tickets for more information). Using change advisory boards to monitor and approve change requests will further minimize risk.

EXAMPLE  1 You may wish to make a major equipment change to improve the quality of the services you provide. Using a standalone change request ticket to manage the change will keep your change approval process on track.

EXAMPLE  2 If a series of customers report several issues that seem to have a common cause, you'll probably track each issue as an incident and associate those incidents with a problem ticket, so you can manage the root cause and the separate instances together. If you find that you'll have to make a significant change in order to resolve the problem, you can create a change request ticket to manage the change process and associate the related problems and/or incidents with the change request, so they can all be tracked together. Please note that you can also associate incidents directly with a change request without creating a problem ticket.

Change requests tickets work the same way as basic service request tickets, but the additional Problems, Incidents, Change Info, and Approvals tabs help you manage the change request process. On problem and incident tickets that are associated with a change request ticket, a Changes tab links them together.

  • The Problems and Incidents tabs allow you to associate other tickets with change requests so you can keep track of which tickets are related to the change request. Refer to:
    The Problems tab

    The Incidents tab
    The Changes tab

  • The fields that appear on the Change Info tab track critical change-related fields, like Impact Analysis, Rollout Plan, Backout Plan, etc. These fields can be relabeled, sorted, and activated or inactivated. If you have enabled the Client Portal, these fields can be hidden in the portal, but displaying them will allow customer contacts to participate in the approval process. Refer to The Change Info tab and Managing change info fields for more information.
  • Change request approvals and rejections are tracked on the Approvals Tab. You'll be able to see exactly who approved or rejected the change, and why. You can manage approval settings on each change request ticket to require the approval of either an entire change advisory board or only one member. A counter on the tab (#/#) shows the number of approvers who approved/total number of eligible approvers. Approvers who rejected the change are not included in the first total. Refer to The Approvals tab and Managing change advisory boards.

Resources with change request tickets waiting their approval will see those tickets on the My Change Requests tab of the My Tasks and Tickets page. Refer to The My Workspace page for more information.

How to...

  1. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.
  2. Click Create > Ticket.
  3. On the New Ticket page, select the Change Request ticket type. For general information about creating tickets, refer to Adding, copying, and editing tickets. For an overview of Autotask ticket types, refer to Selecting a ticket type.
  1. On any ticket list, right-click a ticket and select Delete Ticket.
    or
    On the Ticket page, select Tools > Delete
  1. Confirm the deletion.

NOTE  Deleting a change request ticket will not delete any associated problem or incident tickets. Only the association will be removed.

Refer to The Incidents tab and The Problems tab.

Refer to The Change Info tab.

Refer to The Approvals tab.

New events, conditions, and updates have been added to workflow rules to support automated handling of change request tickets. For example, if you have a multi-tiered approval process (e.g. Technical Advisory Board, followed by Financial Advisory Board), you can use a workflow rule to automatically assign the change request ticket to the second advisory board when the first advisory board approves the change. You can even include data from the Change Info tab on your workflow rule notifications.

Refer to Workflow rule examples for more information.

The LiveReport Ticket Change Approval Status is designed to support reporting on change request tickets. If it has been published to you, you can find it here: > Service Desk > Reports > LiveReports.

If you want to design your own LiveReport, fields and categories that support reporting on change request tickets are available.

You can configure your Duplicate Ticket Handling settings for ATES and Autotask Web Services to create a group of tickets (using the change request/incident ticket relationship) when a duplicate is found, and then continue to add duplicate incidents to the change request ticket.

Refer to Configure the Duplicate Ticket Handling system setting.