Copy Notes to Change

The workflow of a change can consist of many tasks. Some of these may ask for information that is relevant for other tasks later on. For example, during the risk and impact analysis a specialist may be asked whether the implementation is going to cause downtime, which is important information for the approvers. Or during the implementation a specialist may take a specific item from stock, which the configuration manager needs to know about for the update of the CMDB.

Rather than asking people to review the notes in the individual tasks, such information can now be added to the change itself. By checking the “Copy note to change” box underneath the Note field of the task, the note will also be added to the change that the task is a part of. This includes any attachments that are part of the note.

The specialists who work on subsequent tasks will see this note when they open the change from their tasks. Approvers also see the note. That is because all the notes of a change are included in the Change Summary PDF file that is generated for each approval task.

It gets better, though. Change managers can dictate in task templates that the “Copy note to change” box should be checked by default. This is done by checking the “Copy additional notes to change by default” box.

When a specialist receives a task that is based on a template in which this option is set, the “Copy note to change” box will already be checked. That should make sure that the specialist does not accidentally forget to copy the information to the change.