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Introduction and background
Purpose and goals of change management
- Ensure that standard methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes.
- Ensure that we respond to the customers’ changing business requirements while maximizing value and reducing incidents, disruption and rework.
- Ensure that we respond to business and IT requests for change that will align the services with the business needs.
- Ensure that changes are recorded in Service Desk, Configuration Management System (CMS) and then evaluated, authorized, prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner and take necessary corrective action.
Benefits of change management process
- Creates a culture of change management across the organization.
- Aligns the service change management process with business, project and business/organization change management processes.
- Allows us to prioritize changes.
- Establishes accountability/responsibilities for changes.
- Establishes a single focal point for changes to minimize conflicting changes and potential disruption.
- Prevents anyone who is not authorized to make changes from having access to the production environment.
- Establishes change windows.
- Allows us to do performance and risk evaluation of all changes.
Indicators of poor change management
- Unauthorized changes
- Unplanned outages
- A low change success rate
- A high number of emergency changes
- Delayed project implementations
Risk factors
While ‘Normal’ and ‘Standard’ sound like two ways to describe the same thing, there’s a big difference. A Standard change must have a documented process that’s been reviewed and approved by Change Management. A Normal change is a non-emergency proposed change that needs to be reviewed by Change Management.
Standard changes (pre-authorized)
A standard change is a change to a service or infrastructure for which the approach is pre- authorized by change management that has an accepted and established procedure to provide a specific change requirement.
- The elements of a standard change are
- There is a defined trigger to initiate the request for change
- The activities/tasks are well known, documented and proven
- Authority is given in advance (these changes are pre-authorized)
- The risk is usually low
Normal change
A normal change refers to changes that must follow the complete change management process. Normal changes are often categorized according to risk and impact to the organization/business. For example, minor change – low risk and impact, significant change – medium risk and impact and major change – high risk and impact. By definition a normal change will proceed through all steps of the change management process and all changes categorized as low, medium or high risk will be reviewed by the Change Advisory Board (CAB).
Activities of the normal change process
- Record requests for change
- Change logging
- Review the request for change
- Assess and evaluate the change
- Allocation of priorities
- Change planning and scheduling
- Authorizing the change
- Coordinating change implementation
- Review and close change record
Emergency changes
Emergency change is reserved for changes intended to repair an error in a service that is impacting the business to a high degree or to protect the organization from a threat.