Change Management Problems
I am part of a system administrator team responsible for applying updates to our server farm. Each server is categorized as QA or Production. Our normal cycle is to apply OS updates to QA; allow application owners (people we have made responsible for QA testing - Change Advisory Board in Service Desk) to test the applications on the QA systems to confirm the updates did not break anything; then have the application owner approve the OS updates (changes, if you will) for installation to our production environment. I then take the approval and proceed to apply the updates to the production environment.
I've been trying to use ServiceDesk Plus Change Management for this process. Here are the issues I've run into:
-- Creating a change request every month for each application that needs testing (we have 50) is burdensome. We can't ask our systems admins to spend hours upon hours each month creating change requests. If there was a way to save each request and be able to pull it up for use during the following month...
-- We need a way to automate the sending of notifications to the Change Advisory Boards that a change needs to be approved. Going through and sending all these requests one click at a time makes the tool unusable. Maybe a scheduling tool? Or a way to send these in batch? Or improve the API so something besides Requests can be automated?
We've been testing ServiceDesk Plus to see if it will satisfy our needs. So far, due to the reasons I've stated above, it isn't. Maybe I'm missing something. Can the tool do what I'm requesting above and I'm just not seeing it?