One of my teammates calls change management the "eat your vegetables of ITSM." Just like eating veggies is important for getting nutrients and staying healthy, there is good reason to practice change management — the need for coordination between sometimes misaligned teams and regulatory requirements.
Of course, we all know getting our greens can be unappetizing. It's not unlike the often bitter process of navigating complex, slow, and bureaucratic change management systems. So how can we make the change management practice of avoiding incidents, complying with regulation, and coordinating work across siloed teams less nasty?
At Atlassian, we're developing software for a modern approach to change management. Using Jira Service Management and Bitbucket Cloud together streamlines change management workflows so teams can accelerate their software delivery while managing risk. Here are some of the benefits of this integration between Jira Service Management and Bitbucket Pipelines.
Eliminate toil by creating change requests right from Bitbucket Pipelines
One of the most common complaints we hear about change management is the tedious work it creates for developers who have to log into a different system to manually submit a detailed change request ticket. Now, developers can create their change request without ever leaving Bitbucket Pipelines.
In Bitbucket Pipelines, developers can submit and track the progress of the change request without context switching.
We are also building the capability to set up control gates in your pipeline that will prevent deployments from automatically going out to your key environments, such as production. Once a change is approved, Jira Service Management automatically ungates the deployment and pushes that change in to production.
Here’s how it works.
Reduce risk and speed delivery with our risk assessment engine
Our assessment engine, powered by Jira Automation, can quickly score the risk of a change based on factors like the affected services. If the risk is low, changes can be auto-approved and deployed. High risk changes are routed for additional approvals.
Gain insight into changes with total traceability in one place
Our approach to change management gives IT Ops a complete audit trail of the changes deployed in Jira Service Management. This unblocks development teams and provides full traceability for Ops, making it easier for the teams to work as partners. Gone are the days of coordinating over email and waiting for CABs for context about every change.
Jira Service Management offers one view of open changes along with their risk level and status.
Clicking into a change request provides full context about a change, including the services it affects and the pipeline information. You can also automatically tie Jira Software issues containing related development work using smart commits. Approvers have a complete record that enables confident decisions.
With deployment information flowing into Jira Service Management, IT teams can also track deployments on a timeline to associate it with incidents. If a certain deployment potentially caused an incident, IT teams know which dev team to reach out to implement a fix.
With Bitbucket and Jira Service Management, dev and IT teams can work together seamlessly to manage software releases. To learn more about change management processes with Bitbucket and Jira Service Management, watch this on-demand webinar.
