Mandatory Planned Start/End Dates for Changes

SolarWinds Service Desk is happy to announce an enhancement now available on the Changes page that allows you to make it mandatory for change requesters to include a planned start and end date when creating a change. By collecting this data early in the process, you can better optimize how you schedule your changes, reducing potential collisions.

To activate this feature:

  1. Go to the Setup menu and click on the “Service Desk” dropdown
  2. Click the “Service Desk” Option
  3. Find the option for “Mandatory Change fields” and toggle it on

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Why It’s Important:

Your organization may be implementing multiple changes per week (if not per day) across multiple teams. Sometimes these teams do not properly communicate what they are changing, and more importantly, when they intend to do them. This lack of visibility can cause change collisions that can result in unexpected and prolonged downtime of critical IT services your employees rely on.

By making the planned start and end dates mandatory, you get better insights into any potential change collisions. This helps your cross-functional IT teams better schedule their changes in ways that will not cause any adverse impacts on your IT infrastructure and the services you provide.

Let’s see an example of how this could work in your organization:

Example:

Picture your organization experiencing an issue with a mission-critical application, requiring you to perform an emergency change. You rush to get the details of the change into the system, but due to the urgency, you don’t provide a planned start and end date because you plan to start the work on this change immediately. However, you are not aware of a change which is currently being implemented on the same server that the application you are performing the emergency change on is located. This could cause unexpected issues that could result in prolonged downtime of critical IT services your employees rely on.

This new capability will require you to provide a planned start and end date of each change, giving you instant visibility on any potential collisions. This allows you to better schedule your changes, or help you understand if another change could potentially impact yours (similar to the example above), allowing you to plan accordingly. Moreover, this helps your change management team as well as your Change Advisory Board (CAB) improve visibility and planning of upcoming changes.

As we continue to improve SolarWinds Service Desk, we appreciate your feedback. Let us know what you think about this enhancement!

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