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Change Management - Forward schedule of changes
The objective of the Forward Schedule of Change (FSC) is to inform the recipients of the upcoming changes which will be implemented in the next period and beyond. There should be enough information in the FSC for the person reading to determine whether the change is going to affect them and to be able to view the change request in detail by having key data.A simple form of FSC would be like RFC No. Change Summary, Planned date of implementation and status of the RFC. The FSC should be available for everyone within the organisation. It just acts like the change calendar for external users. What it does is enables the IT and business people to schedule their RFC accordingly.
Changes to IT applications (or infrastructure) must be scheduled and communicated well in advance to identify dependencies and avoid risks to the production environments. The Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC) is the document used to communicate change plans to the organization. Use this template to:
- Track the list of approved changes and the proposed implementation dates.
- Provide visibility to key stakeholders on the status of changes being introduced in the production environment.
Ideally, the FSC should be part of an automated configuration/change management or IT service desk solution. If such a solution does not exist, employ this FSC template.
Other ITIL Processes
In order to have a good understanding of ITIL and the importance of configuration management, we first define what ITIL is: ITIL is literally a collection of documentation.
This documentation can help IT organizations implement the best practices. The documentation grows and grows as more successful techniques are documented and guidelines established for what can make others successful. The latest ITIL resources are published by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
Integrated service delivery refers to the need for Configuration Management, Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and Release Management processes that are linked together in a meaningful manner. For example, the process of releasing components to the live environment (the domain of Release Management) is also an issue for Configuration Management and Change Management whilst the Service Desk is primarily responsible for liaison between IT providers and the Users of services. This section highlights the links and the principal relationships between all the Service Management and other infrastructure management processes.
ITIL processes fall under Operational Layer or Tactical Layer, as follows:
| Operational Layer: | Configuration Management - Service Desk Management - Incident & Problem Management - Change Management - Release Management |
| Tactical Layer: | Service Level Management - Availability Management - Capacity Management - Continuity Management - Financial Management |