Automatic selection of full Change type
If you use the PMCHGMAIN1 workflow to process your full Changes, the Change type is selected automatically. During the Accept and Categorize phase, the workflow conducts a series of calculations to determine key values for the Change. Based on those calculations and other information, a response plan is applied, and the response plan locates the correct job plan for the Change. The job plan then brings the appropriate type into the Change.
If you specify a Change type manually before the job plan is applied, and the job plan is associated with a different type, the type from the job plan overwrites the type that you specified. For example, you might initially specify the standard type for a Change; when the workflow calculates the projected impact based on the target CIs, it might discover an impacted CI with a high business impact. As a result, the response plan might locate a job plan for a normal Change, to ensure that the Change process includes assessment, scheduling, and authorization.
Before it invokes an action to apply the response plan, the workflow calculates the priority, impact, and risk of the Change, using the values that you supply for urgency and probability of failure. Each field has a numeric value that indicates the degree of intensity. For example, in the Impact field, 1 indicates a very high impact on business-critical CIs; 5 indicates a low impact.
When you create a Change, you can manually specify these values, or accept default values that are provided for some of the fields. When the workflow assigns the values, it looks at the prior value and the calculated value, and assigns the lower of these two numbers (indicating the greater intensity). For example, if you specify an impact of 2 and the workflow calculates an impact of 1, 1 is the assigned value for this field.
The fields, and their possible values, are as follows:
- Urgency
- Your estimate of the current necessity for this Change. The urgency is based on how long the implementation can afford to be delayed. A value of 1 specifies the highest urgency; 5 indicates the lowest urgency. You manually specify the urgency to enable the workflow to calculate priority.
- Impact
- Initially, your estimate of the overall impact of the Change,
based on the degree to which the Change will impact your business.
You enter this estimated value in the Impact field
of the Change. When the workflow calculates impact, it overwrites
your initial specification if the calculated impact value is lower
(more intense) than the one that you supplied. An impact of 1 is
used for a Change that will have a large impact on business-critical
CIs; an impact of 5 indicates a low impact.
The Business Impact scores of the target and impacted CIs are used
for these calculations.
The calculated impact value during the Accept and Categorize phase is displayed in the Outage Impact field in the Impacts tab of the Changes application. In the Total Outages field in the Impacts tab, the workflow supplies a value that represents the total number of CI outages that will result from the Change.
- Priority
- The priority of a Change indicates whether this Change must be performed before other Changes in the data center. Priority is derived from impact and urgency. A value of 1 indicates the highest priority, with 5 the lowest priority.
- Probability of failure
- The failure probability of a Change reflects the likelihood that the Change will not be successful. Changes that are performed only occasionally might have a higher failure probability, because they cannot be predicted with accuracy. A high probability of failure might also indicate that the Change involves extremely business-critical CIs whose outages are not well understood. Failure probability ranges from 1 to 3. Job plans have associated failure probabilities; a value that is brought in by a job plan overwrites the previously supplied value if the failure probability is more likely than what was manually provided.
- Risk
- The risk of a Change is derived from its overall impact and the probability of failure. A high-risk Change is one that is not performed often, involves many business-critical CIs, or has a high probability of failure. High-risk Changes have the potential to cause disruptive outages across the data center and must be managed with care. A risk of 1 indicates a very critical risk; 4 indicates a relatively low risk.
- Remove the PMCHGREPORTRISK action from the PMCHGSETRISK1-4 action groups.
- Remove the PMCHGREPORTIMPACT action from the PMCHGSETIMPACT* action groups.
When the workflow performs its calculations during the Accept and Categorize phase, it first calculates the priority based on your supplied urgency value and the initial value for impact. The preliminary impact value is then set, based on a comparison of the current impact value and the automated impacts preview for potential impacted CIs. Finally, the workflow performs its initial risk calculation based on the preliminary impact and probability of failure.