What are risk insights in change management?

One of the main goals of change management is to prevent incidents and ensure process compliance. High-risk changes in a fast-paced environment might lead to time consuming and stressful incidents. Meanwhile, low-risk changes that shouldn’t need to be managed might take up lots of time and are usually slow. The risk insights panel helps the Change Advisory Board (CAB) understand the potential risks of a change by providing an overall look at recent incidents and other changes scheduled within the same timeframe and same service.

Risk insights panel

The risk insights panel is located on your issue view. In its initial state, it doesn’t show any data. To view all potential risks, the fields below must be available and filled in on the issue view of your change:

• Affected services

• Planned start

• Planned end

There are three tabs on the panel:

• Risk summary – The risk summary tab shows you the change conflicts, freeze and maintenance windows, and open incidents on the same service and within the same timeframe of your change.

• Changes – If there are one or more changes in the same timeframe with your change, you can see them here as conflicting changes. It also shows other changes planned within up to seven days after the planned end date for your change. A freeze window might also be a conflict to your change. You may view current or upcoming freeze windows under conflicts and upcoming changes. Maintenance windows might or might not be a conflict, depending on your organization’s preference. You may see any maintenance window listed under the Changes tab. Read more about change windows.

• Incidents – Ongoing incidents on the same affected service are considered as risks to your change. You may also view recently resolved or closed incidents and decide whether they are a risk to the current change.

• Failures – Multiple rejections of changes on the same service or objects could indicate an underlying issue that the change approver may not be aware of. Likewise, repeated failed deployments may demand extra scrutiny. As a change approver, understanding the reasons behind these failures offers valuable guidance on whether to greenlight the change. Besides tracking rejected changes and unsuccessful deployments, analyzing the issue reporter's data can offer crucial insights. Reviewing how many recent changes from the issue reporter have been turned down is also beneficial.

Customize the risk insights panel

Though the risk insights panel offers a variety of information to the change approver, not all of them might be relevant at all times. Different versions of the panel might be more valuable for each service project. To configure the risk insights panel:

1. From your service project, select Project settings, then Operations, then Change management.

2. Switch to the Risk insights tab.

3. On the Risk insights tab settings section select the tabs you’d like to show in the risk insights panel. If you unselect all the tabs, risk insights tab will disappear from your changes.

4. On the Rejected changes configuration section, select which data you’d like to see. You can choose to show rejected changes, failed deployments and the rejected changes of the issue reporter. When selecting this option make sure to select which issue statuses you consider as a failure too.