🗓 Introducing the Change calendar!

[#1]

Hey Community,

I’m Gabriel, the Product Manager who looks after Jira Service Management’s Change Management features. For those of you who are interested in using Jira Service Management to manage changes, we’re excited to announce our native change calendar!

We built the change calendar so you can schedule and view changes that are happening, reduce risk, and streamline your change management processes.

You can access the calendar now through any Jira Service Management IT service management (ITSM) project. Soon you’ll be able to use it in any of your Jira Service Management projects – in the future, we’ll be rolling out the capability to turn on ITSM functionality for all other JSM project types.

You can also see how it works in the video linked here! 

Visualise the changes that matter to you

You’ll be able to visualise all of your past, present and future changes in one place. Or, if you need to get more specific, filtering means you can see only the changes that matter to you.

You can filter down to changes on particular services, so you can make sure your critical services are kept safe. Or, if you’re responsible for a project, you can just see the changes on that project. Want to just see changes that are in planning, or waiting to be implemented? You can do that, too, with status filters.

Create, edit or reschedule changes straight from the calendar

Now that you’ve got a comprehensive view of your changes, you might need to move a few around. Or maybe you’ll need to schedule a new one?

You can create, edit or reschedule changes directly from the change calendar - it’s as easy as dragging a change to a better time, or selecting a time to create a new one. Need to see more information first? You can click on a change to get critical information about it, and to edit that change if need be.

Schedule changes from the issue view

What if you’ve just received a new change request, and want to make sure it’s scheduled at the right time? You can schedule changes straight from the issue view, without needing to exit to look at the calendar.

You don’t need to do anything to get started - any change requests with ‘Planned start’ and ‘Planned end’ dates populated will show up on your calendar automatically.

What’s next?

In the coming months, we’re adding freeze windows and maintenance windows to the calendar, so you can define the right and wrong times to schedule a change. Keep your eyes out for more info.

How is Jira Service Management Change Management working for you?

As we continue to build out change management, we’re eager to hear what the Atlassian community thinks. we’d love to talk to you about how it’s been working for you, what we can do to make it better than ever. Whether it’s about the change calendar, or our other features, we’d love to chat with you!

Please reach out to Arvind at sarvind@atlassian.com!

[Dirk Ronsmans]

@Gabriel Raubenheimer,Awesome! been looking forward to something like this. Especially for Infrastructure changes this will be a great help in planning and visualizing them!

I'm hoping this will also be something we can (in the future) add as a gadget on a dashboard and/or embed in a confluence page.

I'm a bit confused about your following statement:

Soon you’ll be able to use it in any of your projects – in the future, we’ll be rolling out the capability to turn on ITSM functionality for all other project types.

That's a pretty broad statement :)

I'll have to play around with it a for a bit and will reach out if I have any feedback!

Oh btw, is this something that will be available on all plans or something just for Premium and up?

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Hey there @Dirk Ronsmans !

Great to hear it's something you've been after!

Soon you’ll be able to use it in any of your projects – in the future, we’ll be rolling out the capability to turn on ITSM functionality for all other project types.

At the moment, you need to have a project created with the ITSM project template to use many ITSM features, including Change Management and the Change calendar. Soon, you'll have the option to toggle these on in a project that wasn't created with that template. Hope that clarifies.

This will be available for all plans.

I look forward to hearing any feedback you have!

Best,

Gabriel

[Walter Buggenhout]

So if I understand correctly, the following means JSM projects - regardless of the template they were created from (and not in JSW or JWM projects):

At the moment, you need to have a project created with the ITSM project template to use many ITSM features, including Change Management and the Change calendar. Soon, you'll have the option to toggle these on in a project that wasn't created with that template. Hope that clarifies.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

i'm a bit confused about that one too. "A project not created with that template" could mean a lot of things (including JSW and JWM projects). 

I don't see what the need would be on JWM yet and I'm sure we can find a work around for JSW (linked change or something) but still confusing at the moment :)

i'm guessing we wont be able to just enable this on an old JSD project right? (altho that would be great too)

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Thanks for the comments all!

This is any project in Jira Service Management - we've updated the above to reflect this!

[Claire Bedington]

Hi Gabriel, I am a new Jira user and was wondering if you could point me to any online tutorials that will enable me to set up the end to end 'Change Management' features?

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@Claire Bedington welcome to Jira!

I would recommend starting here. I would be very interested to hear how useful that is for you - if you have any feedback, or there are particular topics you would like to see covered more comprehensively, please let me know.

Gabriel

[Kathi Paquet]

Great feature!  

[Darla Sheehan]

Update: Figured out the issue. If the issue has the "Request Type" as empty, it does not show up on the calendar.

---------------------------

Hi, Very excited about this feature!

Question, I have created a new service management project in jira cloud, added data for both "Planned Start" and "Planned End", but my "Change Calendar" is empty for those dates. What am I doing wrong to have it show up on the calendar?

[Deleted user]

Thank you very much for this long awaited feature, it looks good and I really like the ability to re-schedule tickets from within it. One request from senior management is to be able to differentiate changes at a glance i.e. by colour. It would be great to be able to assign colours based on severity or by service.

[Annabelle Fontinha]

I really love this feature ! At our company we also would like to schedule service requests (like upgrading a service with a new release, or deploying a new release on an environment). Are you intending to also make this feature available for service requests? Or do you assume that this kind of service request should be managed as changes? Or do you suggest any other solution? Thank you so much for your advices and for the feature !

Annabelle F.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

@Annabelle Fontinha ,

Imho those things should be handled as Changes. 

Especially deploying something on production, as you'd want a risk analysis and backout plan if something goes wrong.

That does mean more administration so I can see why you'd want to do it as a Service Request.

For flexibility I hope they also release this for other issue types but ITIL wise I'd think this ought to be Changes :)

[Annabelle Fontinha]

Thanks @Dirk Ronsmans for your responsiveness and answer ! It confirms what I was guessing :-)

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

@[deleted] thanks for the question!

It's something we're actively looking into. I'd be interested to hear more about how you'd like to use colours. If you'd like to chat more about it, please reach out via email (graubenheimer@atlassian.com)!

[Kathi Paquet]

I like the idea of using colors.  From my use case, I would use colors to based of Change Type (Standard, Normal, Emergency). If this was an option where you could select like on the Agile Boards, the color and the condition.  For I see I could expand this to the Services to determine which are Server 1 and Server 2 or even the Impact.

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Hello @Gabriel Raubenheimer 

This will be really useful. I will try this!

Thanks,

Ravi

[Gabriel Raubenheimer]

Thank you for that @Kathi Paquet , that's great to get an understanding of.

[johan.wikstrom]

Hi, is it possible to set the default view to Month and not Week?

[Brittany Wispell]

Hey @Gabriel Raubenheimer 

This is AMAZING! So excited for this feature. 

When might this be available for Data Center? 

Sorry if I've missed the answer or someone has already asked this. 

Thanks!

[Dave Liao]

@Dirk Ronsmans beat me to it - I'm glad this feature exists, but hopefully there are (or will be) ways to publish/view these calendars in other places - like Confluence!

[Susan Hauth _Toronto ACE Leader_]

@Gabriel Raubenheimer , excellent feature.   There used to be a "calendar" feature in Jira that fell away and only worked on due date, but it was really helpful.  I always wondered why it fell away.  When it went away we moved to using the confluence team calendars which work pretty good but not interactive like this one.  We have not yet migrated to cloud but looking forward to this great new feature when we get there.  

By the way, any subscribe ability for Outlook, Google, etc calendars?

Susan

[Erik Neudert]

A really welcome feature.

@Gabriel Raubenheimer  what is the roadmap to bring this to DC?

[Scott Boisvert]

Assuming this is Cloud only? No love for Data Center?

[David Washburn]

@Gabriel Raubenheimer how would I enable this for a team-managed project currently? I don't see it listed under Features.

[Andrey Kiyanovskiy]

Looks good for the starter! It'd be nice to have the filters more flexible. Can we add basic/advanced JQL filers as in the Issue search?