In ITIL-based organisations, it's common for Changes to be in a "Pre-approval" state of flux; with minor revisions and changes being allowed. When the Change moves into "Pending Approval" it should be locked with no further changes to the Change Plan, timing, or essential details being possible.
Once approved, it should be completely locked in with no changes at all possible. At the scheduled implementation time, the state should move to "Implementation" automatically; and at the end time, the state should move to "Implementation Window Closed" or similar. Once that is done, there should be an "Implementation Report" section where any deviations from the plan, rollbacks and issues during the work should be recorded: and the implementer should be able to select "Successful"; "Successful with issues" or "Unsuccessful" - along with a status of "Rolled Back", "Partly rolled back" or "Not rolled back". "Successful with issues" or "Unsuccessful" should offer to take the user to a "New Incident" screen to raise a ticket for the issues - and any resulting ticket should be raised automatically "Related" to the source Change.
I realise it's theoretically possible to implement a lot of this in a workflow process; however this is how Change processes work "out of the box" in many products. I'd like to see SWSD go in this direction, or one like it.
