Every well designed process or system relies on a feedback mechanism to ensure stability and to achieve a desired goal (that’s right, a process is a small system and not a Visio diagram). That?s simply a text book definition from school, but I?ve certainly come to respect the need for feedback in life as well as managing business processes.

So if you want your ITIL Change Management process to be more than pumping paperwork faster, then consider what feedback controls need to be designed into the workflow.

Here are some control points to design in:

Unplanned (aka unauthorized) changes - your CMDB should have capability to kick out daily alerts for CIs with change events that are under configuration control and not have a recently scheduled production change.

Business Verification - your workflow should allow the business representative to verify that certain types of changes are working as planned from the end user?s perspective.

Operational Monitoring - the changed CI is being monitored (or not if that was the type of change). If monitoring isn?t the appropriate mechanism for verifying a particular change then a test script or inspection should be run upon rolling it into production.

Production Operations Check-off - indicating that the RFC was promoted to production Operations successfully or rolled back

In addition to feedback for individual changes, the overall process should be periodically checked using management metrics.

Management KPI (Key Performance Metrics) trend the process results. Some examples are decreasing (hopefully) preventable errors, reduction or steady state number of emergency changes, or a reduction in untested changes. Now an undesirable trend is not always due to a poor process. People may simply be making errors in judgment. However, KPIs trending out of the desired limits may be telling you the process itself needs to be reevaluated.

Download Evergreen’s free Change Management Policies and Procedures Guide

Also, Don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

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