Best Practices

Has anyone ever used KACE service desk to track changes on the network? Our auditors are requiring us to document changes, and to have a process in place that shows who made the change and who approved the change. The policy requires some categories of changes to be approved by a superior, whereas others can be self-approved. I have already begun to experiment and tried this two different ways; one would be a ticket, the other would be a process. The ticket is a good way to track a self-approved change, whereas the process is better for the type of change that requires a superior to approve you.

However, there are drawbacks to both. For the ticket, the issue here is that there would appear to be no way to force you to select someone other than yourself when selecting an approver while creating the ticket. For example, policy allows me to approve my own changes to switch and router configurations, but I must be approved by a superior for doing software upgrades. In theory, I could create a ticket for a software upgrade, put myself as the approver and get the ticket completed, even though I am not authorized to self-approve those types of changes. I would never do that, but an auditor might object because there is nothing in place to prevent that.

The other thing I looked at doing is the process. The nice thing about the process is that I can make it such that if it is a change that policy requires me to get a superior’s approval for, then I can specify all who can approve me and leave myself out of the list. The shortcoming of this method is that when we tested it, we found that if you have a parent ticket only, and not a child ticket, then once someone approves it, the process gets closed out. We really do not need child tickets, but that appears to be the only way to allow a process to stay open after approval. We would prefer if somehow the process could be approved yet remain open and wait for the owner of the ticket to close it.

Any thoughts?