I have faced a question from many people - Are all service requests a change? People believe that it is so as they do not understand the fundamental difference between the two. They feel that every service request involves a change in the state of live IT infrastructure.
To answer this question, I would first prefer to explain the two individually:
Service Request:
Service request is the request from the user for any information, documention, advice or access.
Example: user manuals, password reset, etc.
Change
Change is defined as an addition, modification or removal of an approved, supported or basedlined CI.
Example: Upgrade of a server, modification of a documentation, addition of a new service.
Now going back to our question, I would like to make a statement - 'Service request is not a change'. It does happen that a number of low impact changes, which are known to cause no negative impact to the IT environment are pre-approved for implementation. These changes are referred to as standard changes. These pre-approved changes are also treated as a Service Request and the request is fulfilled by Request Fulfillment team.
All these definition , I feel , are artificial. Actually user has only issues or colloquially speaking problem. Its for people like us to split into service request, incident and problem.
ReplyDeleteActually the request for User manual is arising because he has a problem in using items described by the manual.
Password reset is a problem.
Even though we try to explain these differences to process owners in real business world, finally it depends on them what and how they want to define things...also, this is effective when we are using the whole suit of apps. Anyways, the post is very enlightening....thanks.
ReplyDeletelast thing, if the password itself is recorded as CI, then I guess all the definitions request, incident and problem will get polarized towards the term change. interesting :)
I like your definition. Yes IT users will not bother with that question and they don't need to: it's an IT task to clarify and select the right channel (incident or change process) to handle a users request...
ReplyDeleteEspecially in bigger IT organisations (100+ IT people) it is important and as well difficult to clearly define what are standard changes to be handeled as service requests...