ITSM Change Management for Zendesk
Zendesk + SweetHawk = Powerful Change Management
While Zendesk does not natively support every aspect of change management, it does offer a powerful and flexible platform that can be used to support effective change management. With the right tools and expertise, you can build on the features that Zendesk provides to create a customized change management solution that meets the unique needs of your organization.
By leveraging the capabilities of Zendesk, you can streamline your change management processes and ensure that changes are carried out effectively and efficiently.
Specific items where SweetHawk helps:
Specifying a “change” ticket type.
Predefining the information required for change approvals.
Predefining the approver(s) who need to assess a change before it can be implemented.
Sending out clear and simple-to-action approval requests to anyone.
Easily trackable audit logs of who approved/implemented what on a ticket.
Ability to plan changes on a change calendar.
Linking changes to their origin and building workflows based on the status of change tickets.
More details on where SweetHawk apps help
Using SweetHawk apps you’re able to create seamless change flows in Zendesk. Our apps will not only address the items listed above, but they also come with a raft of other benefits:
Consistency: The ability to enforce flow for all your change processes means that you can bank on consistent outcomes.
Time savings: With the ability to automate many parts of your change flow, there is less manual work for agents.
Money savings: You might be thinking that since SweetHawk saves you time it saves you money. While this is true, you can also save actual money. Since SweetHawk approvers don’t need to be agents in Zendesk, there’s no need to pay for those extra agents.
Auditability: With in-ticket and in-app audit logs that track agent and approver actions, adhering to compliance frameworks becomes plain sailing.
Flexibility: SweetHawk has many apps to cater for many use cases. This allows you to handpick the apps you specifically need without clogging up your Zendesk with excessive or confusing functionality.
Insights: Our super tight integrations mean that most things in SweetHawk are also stored on the Zendesk ticket. This allows you to slice and dice data as you see fit using Zendesk’s native reporting engine, Explore.
There you have it. From the first reported incident to wrapping up a change implementation, SweetHawk enables you to accurately classify changes, predefine flows & required approvers, schedule and implement them easier than ever, in Zendesk.
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Ok, so let's get into a little more detail about exactly how SweetHawk apps help each step along the way...
Here at SweetHawk, we love the way Zendesk does incident and problem management. However, once a problem is logged, the path forward regarding change management, approvals, planning and project implementation has always been open to interpretation.
Where SweetHawk apps can help to facilitate change flow in Zendesk.
Change
ADDING THE TYPE
A ‘change’ might be considered as a missing ticket ‘type’ in Zendesk for ITSM purposes. As such, the Field Rules app allows you to create your own custom type field with whatever types you like - including change. Those types can then be mapped back to Zendesk’s native Type field to retain the unique ability to link incidents and problems. But since changes are usually much more complex than the other 4 types, the app allows you to conditionally show and hide any field based on the selection of another. This allows you to do things like conditionally showing a different set of Zendesk ticket fields based on the type of change at hand.
THE MISSING LINK
In a similar way that incidents are linked to problems, the SweetHawk Tasks App allows you to link ‘change’ tickets to problems or incidents. This allows agents to track the origin of a change request without the need to go searching.
PLAN WITH CONFIDENCE
Deciding on when a change should take place could mean you find yourself swivel-chairing between Zendesk and several company calendars. The Calendar App allows you to plan events right on the Zendesk ticket across multiple calendars and integrates with Google Calendar and Office365.
AUTOMATING FLOW
Once a problem ticket is waiting for a change ticket to be completed, it can automatically be set to a status of ‘on-hold’ until the change is completed, at which point, it can automatically be moved back to an ‘open’ status. The tagging functionality of the Tasks App allows you to perform actions like these in combination with Zendesk triggers.
Approval
Since Zendesk does not have an in-built approvals engine, the Approve App can provide keystone functionality for businesses that need to design and regiment transparent & watertight approval processes. It caters for multiple use cases entailing multi-step sequential or parallel approvals, conditional approvals, line manager approvals and group approvals where only a percentage of a team is required to give the nod before approval is considered officially ‘granted’.
ANYONE CAN BE AN APPROVER
You don’t need to be an agent in Zendesk to be an approver. All that is required is that approvers check their email, and click “Approve” or “Decline” on the data they’ve been sent. This simplicity is extremely well suited for those that have limited time and do not want to or know how to login to Zendesk.
Implement
LINK IT BACK TO THE CHANGE
In the same way that ‘change’ tickets can be linked to problems or incidents. The Tasks App also allows you to link implementation tickets to ‘change’ tickets.
AUTOMATED FLOW
When creating a work order, the Tasks App allows you to automatically copy all of the relevant data from the change ticket (including the calendar event details), without the need to manually copy and paste.
Review & wrap-up
AUTOMATED FLOW
The tagging functionality of the Tasks App allows you to automatically set the ‘change’ ticket to ‘open’ at the point the implementation ticket is marked as completed. Once the change manager is satisfied the implementation is complete, when they mark their ticket as done, the ‘problem’ ticket can automatically be re-opened for review before communicating back to the end-users about the newly created solution.
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