Planning configuration change settings

The settings that you define in the Configuration Change Designer (Nuc) application determine the scope of the configuration change management process at your facility. Before defining your settings, be aware of the rules and restrictions that apply.

You use configuration change settings to designate fields and attributes as elements of configuration information that are subject to change control. For each element of configuration information that you include in the process, you specify the type of change control that applies.

The settings you define for fields and attributes are specific to the parent object or classification. For example, a setting that you define for the Site field in the location object does not affect the Site field in the asset or configuration item (CI) objects. A setting that you define for the HP attribute in the PUMP classification does not affect the HP attribute in the ENGINE classification, or use of HP as a user-defined attribute in component specifications..

Settings can be defined at the level of system, organization, or site. By default, any settings that you define for an organization also apply to the constituent sites. For example, an organization-specific setting for the asset object applies to all asset records in that organization, unless a site-specific setting is defined for asset records that belong to one of the constituent sites.

The following rules also apply when you are defining configuration change settings:

  • To activate change control for component records in a particular site or organization, you must define the Status field of the relevant object as a configuration field.
  • You cannot define the Rotating Item field of the location object as a configuration field.
  • You can track changes to component classification by defining the Classification field of the relevant object as a configuration field. You can apply revision tracking to the Classification field, however, you cannot apply approval-based change control. Classification values must be entered and changed in the component record.

Restrictions

The scope of the configuration change management process is restricted in the following ways:

  • Except for classification attributes, it is not possible to apply change control to information in component records that is displayed in table format. Therefore, tabular information is not available for selection in the Configuration Change Designer (Nuc) application.
  • The field validations that are used in the configuration change management process are currently not compatible with the asynchronous validation process which is used by default in the asset management system. For this reason, asynchronous validation is disabled for the Assets (Nuc), Locations (Nuc), and Configuration Items (Nuc) applications, and synchronous validation is applied to all data. Depending on the applicability of the configuration change management process to individual fields and attributes in these applications, you can change the validation settings for individual controls that are not domain-based. Data validation settings are defined in the System Properties application or in the Application Designer application.
  • The Move/Swap/Modify action in the Activities and Tasks application is not affected by configuration change settings. This action can therefore override the change controls that you define in the Configuration Change Designer (Nuc). To prevent any overrides, you must review the business processes that use this action and restrict or disallow access to the Move/Swap/Modify window. One potential workaround is to modify the window to support only asset moves and swaps, similar to the Move/Swap window in the Work Order Tracking (Nuc) and Quick Reporting (Nuc) application.
  • The configuration item object is a system-level object. The configuration change settings that you define for the configuration item object apply at the system level and affect all users.