Sometimes when you look at the Change Request Calendar, do you ever wonder who will be on-call during your change week or day? Has there been a time that a change goes horribly wrong, and you find yourself struggling to figure out who to contact to help with your roll back?
A lot of times I find myself helping a client with either a go-live and/or upgrade and it does not always go as smoothly as it should. The question I usually ask is, who can we contact to help with this change? Or who is the person on call to do the roll back? Usually, I get a general answer of “department so and so can do it”. Okay, great, but that is not a fast-enough response. We need to get the direct person that is supposed to be on call for this sort of change.
Well, there might be a solution to this by just looking at the Change Calendar and having the information there for you. As a starting point, we will use Steve Tuel’s gorgeous Change Calendar post here.
Below is the standard Cireson Change Calendar for SCSM.
I’m going to show you how to include information of who will be on call and/or on vacation within the same calendar. This will give you visibility into who will be working during the change period in case of escalation, and who is on vacation during the change period to proactively prepare resources and personnel.
Here’s how I was able to accomplish this:
1. You will need to create a new Configuration Item Class and seal it once completed.
By using authoring tools, I created a CI Class and made a couple properties to build out my columns. I created, a “List” Data Type as one of my properties. This is my On Call Type List where I just add “On Call” and/or “Vacation”. This gives me the option to choose from in the CR Calendar that you will in my next step.
After sealing and importing the MP, I created my On Call and Vacation values in the library list.
2. You would also need to create a Type Projection (TP) for your CI class that you just created and import into Service Manager as well. The TP would bring in the relationships needed. This can be done by editing the MP’s XML.
3. Once the MP and TP has been imported into Service Manager, it is time to work on the CustomCalendar.html
To Steve’s CR Calendar, I just added my piece to include the On Call and Vacation to display.
You will need to create some On Call users in the Console before anything shows up on the calendar. You can do this in the Configuration Item section of the Console, where you can see the class you had earlier in the authoring tool.
After all is done you will have the final product:
After you have chosen the types you want to see with change calendar, you will have more detailed information at a glance regarding who is on call and who is on vacation during your Change Week or day. This should eliminate any questions about who you should be contacting in case help is needed.
