Policy Templates: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

A policy template in Lazsa is a powerful governance feature that standardizes tools, technologies, and processes to be used across your product development lifecycle. It acts as a framework to enforce organizational policies, ensuring consistency, security, and compliance in digital and data product development.

Tenant Administrators, Configuration Administrators, or users with custom roles having appropriate permissions can create and manage policy templates. Access to policy templates should be restricted to a limited group of responsible stakeholders. This ensures that templates are managed thoughtfully, minimizing unnecessary changes that could disrupt development workflows or introduce inconsistencies. Restricting access also helps maintain governance, security, and compliance with organizational policies.

Click Configuration in the left navigation pane.

On the Platform Setup screen, go to Standards > Policy Templates and click + New Policy Template.

Provide a unique name and description and configure the necessary settings across various tabs. For details, see Creating a Policy Template.

Using a policy template, you can standardize various tools, technologies, and processes to be used across your product development life cycle. These include maturity assessment categories, collaboration tool, feature limits, agile management tool, document management tool, source code repository, front-end, back-end, and data tools and technologies, deployment modes, cloud platform accounts, Kubernetes cluster configurations, OpenShift configurations, Terraform configurations, predefined cloud instance configurations, artifact management tools, CI/CD tools and pipeline configuration, security assessment tools, and deployment stage settings, among others.
For details, see Creating a Policy Template.

In the Policy Templates section, click the ellipsis (...) next to the desired template, select Manage Access, and add or remove administrators as needed. For details, see Managing Access to a Policy Template.

Yes, navigate to the Policy Templates section, find the desired template, click the ellipsis (...), select Request Access, and provide a justification for your request. The template administrator will review and approve or reject your request accordingly. For details, see Requesting Access to a Policy Template

You cannot edit a policy template if it is currently enforced on a product or portfolio. You must first dissociate the template from all associated products or portfolios before making changes. For details, see Editing a Policy Template.

If the technologies you added to the product earlier are not included in the policy template, you will lose access to their associated source code repositories from within Lazsa. However, these repositories will continue to exist in the source code repository tool outside Lazsa.

If you remove a policy template from a product, edit it to exclude certain technologies, and reapply it to the product, those technologies will no longer be available for use within Lazsa. Any source code repositories created earlier for those technologies will remain in the repository tool, but they cannot be accessed or managed through Lazsa since they fall outside the updated guardrails.

While it is technically possible to remove, edit, and reapply a policy template, it is not recommended unless absolutely necessary. Frequent changes to policy templates can disrupt workflows and cause confusion for developers. Additionally, excluded technologies may no longer be accessible from within Lazsa, potentially hindering ongoing development efforts. It is best to thoughtfully plan and finalize the policy template before applying it to a product.

Yes, but only if it is not currently in use by any product or portfolio. You must dissociate the template from all associated entities before deletion. For details, see Deleting a Policy Template.

Yes, you can enforce a policy template on individual products or across an entire product portfolio in Lazsa to ensure consistency.

To apply a policy template to each product individually:

1. Click Configuration in the left navigation pane.

2. On the Platform Setup screen, go to Settings > General > Policy Templates.

3. Select the Product radio button.

   By selecting this option, you ensure that each product can have its own unique template, allowing for tailored policies and governance specific to individual product needs.

4. Then you can go to each product and attach the desired policy template.

While creating or editing a product, go to the Others tab, select the desired policy template, and save the product details. For details, see Enforcing a Policy Template on a Product.

You see the default template listed first (if a template is marked as default), followed by templates you have created or have access to.

Having a separate policy template for each product allows for:

• Customization: Different products may have unique requirements for tools, technologies, or processes that are not shared across the portfolio.

• Flexibility: Separate templates enable tailoring to the specific needs of each product’s development lifecycle, ensuring optimal resource allocation and governance.

• Isolation: Managing policies individually ensures that changes to one product’s template do not inadvertently affect other products.

• Compliance: Certain products may require adherence to specific industry standards or regulations and hence may require a distinct template.

• Innovation: Products in different stages (for example, experimental vs. mature) may need varying levels of governance, allowing for more freedom in early-stage development while maintaining strict guardrails for production-ready products.

This approach ensures that each product can operate under policies best suited to its unique context.

Applying a single policy template to the entire portfolio ensures:

• Consistency: All products within the portfolio adhere to the same tools, technologies, and processes, maintaining uniform standards.

• Simplified Management: Reduces administrative effort by managing a single template instead of multiple templates for individual products.

• Streamlined Governance: Enforces consistent compliance and security policies across all products in a portfolio.

• Ease of Scaling: When new products are added to the portfolio, they automatically inherit the standardized policy template, saving time and ensuring alignment.

This approach is ideal when all products share similar requirements or when uniform governance is critical.

Enforcing a policy template on a product portfolio applies the standardized settings to all products within that portfolio, ensuring uniformity. For details, see Enforcing a Policy Template on a Product Portfolio.

Yes, you can designate one policy template as the default, making it available for enforcement to all users with permissions to create or edit a product. There is no need to request access to the default template.

In the Policy Templates section, click the ellipsis (...) next to the desired template, click Usage Details, and view the list of associated products and portfolios. For details, see Reviewing Usage Details of a Policy Template.

By enforcing standardized tools and processes, policy templates ensure adherence to organizational policies, prevent the addition of unauthorized tools, and enhance overall security and compliance standards.