As company priorities and processes evolve, testing and implementing changes in your workflows is essential, especially for those workflows with a major influence across your business. Should the team push the wrong change live, an alert’s remediation process could be potentially slowed down, or employee information could be revealed to the wrong team.
Having a change control system in place allows for a controlled environment to safely experiment and make adjustments before applying changes to a workflow.
Identifying business-critical workflows
So what makes a workflow sensitive or important? As you start to think about how you want to orchestrate and automate your processes, consider whether it:
Impacts the way people are working
Interacts with multiple systems
Impacts a diverse range of employees
Would cause disruptions or additional risks if changed
If a workflow like this were to break, systems and communications could be blocked, negatively affecting an organization’s security posture or compliance standards.
Take control of your change reviews
Implementing the concept of change control can help foster a stronger culture of consistency, efficiency, and cybersecurity. It’s a great way for the team to test their theories and gain confidence when building.
Valentine at Gitlab spoke of how ensuring the integrity of their workflows is a compliance requirement. “But we do want to perform quality reviews of our workflows. Our team is great, but sometimes, especially under pressure, they can publish workflows too quickly, and it's good to have a second pair of eyes on them. ”
Best practices from the Tines community
But how can you get started? We reached out to our community of builders to hear how their teams successfully implement workflow reviews in Tines:
Document your reasons for changes using the description field
Make sure the person reviewing your changes understands the purpose of your workflow (also called stories in Tines)
Push approved changes promptly to maintain version control
One builder in particular utilizes stories to help streamline their team’s review process:
All change control requests are routed to a single story, where they undergo formatting, enrichment, etc.
A summary of the changes is created through AI
All change control requests are routed to a single Slack channel for visibility and discussion if necessary
And Shasheen from Turo says it’s his favorite feature because it helps his team segregate duties within the Tines platform. He explains the feature’s ease of use, “With the change control feature, you can make changes to a test environment, test it, and then deploy it into production.”
Tips from the Tines Product team
We had to ask our Product team to weigh in as well. These were their must-dos:
Set up change control webhooks to receive all change control notifications for your team. We recommend you customize notifications to align with your team's processes, whether that's notifying certain people in Slack or Teams, and/or storing change control activity in a longer-term data storage product.
Tenant owners should define tenant-wide change control settings based on their judgment and processes. For teams running sensitive or high-risk processes, we recommend enabling change control by default for all new stories created in that team and requiring the change requester to be a separate user from the change approver. Tenant owners can also require each change request to have a name and description for all changes.
But our #1 tip?
Have a standard agreement on what makes a workflow business-critical for your company.
By ensuring the team is aligned on your goals and understands the type of impact a change will have on the live story, you can build more effective workflows. Alignment like this will also create a community of confident builders, which can lead to more efficient workflows as well.
Need some inspiration for a workflow that may benefit from utilizing change control? Check out these Tines stories to get started:
Process CrowdStrike detections, check hashes in VirusTotal, and create tickets in IRIS
Remove a user account in Microsoft Entra ID, BambooHR, AWS, and Slack
To learn more about change control, check out our docs, and be sure to follow the change control section on our What’s New page as we’re always making updates.