Dear All,

I'm new to Service Desk Plus and am tasked with setting up templates and workflows for change requests and release management in Service Desk Plus for the eHealth department of our hospital. Our IT department also uses Service Desk Plus so whatever we build to meet the needs below must not change the approval stages/set up for the IT department. Any advice would be appreciated!

The approval process for e-Health changes is complex because it involves local stakeholders, State Governance groups and an overall State-level Change Reference Group and is therefore non-ITIL standard. Approval includes two main stages of approval: 1. local organisation approval, and 2. State (Victoria) approval.
At each stage, there is an additional body where the change request may need to be signed off before that it can be approved at that overall stage. It looks something like this...

1. user contacts our support team with a change request

2. Support team member creates change request with required consultation

3a. Change request is reviewed at an internal Support Team meeting. It can be approved, rejected, approved pending a modification, or approved pending sign off from a local governance group at the hospital eg. IT CAB; Medication Safety; Nursing Handover; Emergency Department Governance Group etc (there's a lot so I won't list them all).

3b. The local governance groups may approve, reject or recommend a modification. If it requires a modification, the same change request must be re-tabled back at that same group for re-review and final approval once it has been modified. Once the Change Request is approved, it goes to the next stage of approval.
Sign off by a local governance group is not always required but it is possible to require sign off by MULTIPLE local governance groups at this stage.

4a. Depending on the nature of the change request, it may require review by a specific state governance group eg. Pathology & Imaging Reference group, the Medication Reference Group etc before it goes to the state's Change Reference Group.
Again, these governance groups may approve, reject or recommend a modification in the same manner as step 3b.
Similar to 3b, if a modification is required, the change request has to be re-tabled at the same reference group for final approval after the modification to the change request has been made.

4b. The change request is reviewed by the Change Reference Group who will approve/reject or recommend a modification too.
This group includes representation from other state hospitals, the Victorian health department, and a representative from the vendor of our e-Health solution.
Sometimes a change request goes straight to this stage without being reviewed by a State reference group, but in the discussion that occurs in this group there could be recommendations that require review by a State reference group. This means that it is possible for a change request to bounce between 4a and 4b before being finally approved.

It is also possible at 4a and 4b that the recommendations put forward require re-review by the local governance group that originally approved the change (the nature of the politics in healthcare demands this) - so Service Desk Plus must also allow approvals to go back to a previous stage of approval BUT it would be great if it could still keep the date/time stamps of previous approval by the local group instead of undoing the previous approval...

The challenge is keeping up with the stage that each change request is at in this long process - therefore we are hoping that SDP can provide the means to manage this. Can Service Desk Plus create these different approval stages unique to our department without affecting the IT Department's change request approval process?

Thanks in advance!

Melissa