Previewing the impacts of a Change

After you create a Change with associated target configuration items (CIs), you can preview the impacts of the Change. Typically, you preview impacts immediately after creating a Change, so that you can identify a disruptive Change early in the process, before substantial work is performed. However, you can preview impacts at any time. For example, you might want to do so when you modify the list of targets for a Change, modify expected outages, and so on.

About this task

Previewing impacts during the initial Change assessment can provide very useful information. It provides an idea of the scope of the Change by identifying the CIs or assets that can potentially be impacted. You can run this preview after simply creating a Change and attaching targets to the Change, before you perform the time-consuming work of creating individual implementation tasks with targets.

You can manually invoke the impacts preview at any time. The workflow invokes an impacts preview during the assessment phase, to give assessors a quick idea of the impacts that a Change might have.

The results of an impacts preview are not stored. This operation is used for reference purposes only. In addition, for an impacts preview, only the targets on a Change are used to calculate impacts; targets that are specified on individual tasks are not examined.

To preview the impacts of a Change, perform the following steps:

Procedure

  1. With the Change open in the Changes application, select the Impact Analysis > Preview Impacts action. The Preview Impacts of the Change window opens.
  2. In the Preview Impacts of the Change window, open one of the following tabs:
    • Calculated — lists impacted CIs, as calculated by the engine using the impact assessment rules that you have configured.
    • Historical — lists impacted CIs, as retrieved by the engine based on impacts that have historically been identified.
  3. When you have inspected the impacted CIs, click OK to close the window.