We’ve been talking about change lifecycle management lately, so I thought it might be interesting to dissect the components of Change.

Key improvements in Change Management can be found in four phases – planning, approval, execution and review.  Most organizations tend to spend all their time in execution but there are valuable opportunities for improvement in other areas that are often overlooked.

In the area of Change Management planning, typical improvements come from:

• raising the bar for change approval (saying no to changes that are not justified).
• empowering those requesting the change to plan it.
• matching level of effort in change planning with the materiality of the proposed change.
• clarifying and communicating expectations related to change submission completion and lead times.

Most potential for gain in the Change Management Approval area will be uncovered by discussing the Change Approval process with those handling the IT Change Approval process.  Typical improvements come from:

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One of the best places to start ‘changing change management’ is through classic business process re-engineering. These efforts show the greatest gains when looking at workflows that are more complex (have a greater number of steps and approvals) and cross three or more areas (silos) in going from start to finish. Organizations that have not base-lined and re-engineered the top five to six high-volume workflows in IT can see efficiency gains of up to 25-40%.

To calculate the value of re-engineering, select three high-volume workflows crossing three or more areas. Examples may include IT security approval processes, medium-level software programming changes (such as 20 to 40 hours of code development), IT procurement actions and server operating systems or database upgrades:

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We hear a lot of talk these days about KPAs and ITIL process areas. KPAs (Key Process Areas) are used to help develop and measure the benchmarked standards of ITIL and are a good way of measuring your organization’s ‘maturity’ level within an ITIL process area (such as Configuration Management

KPAs apply to a repeatable maturity level. In the Infrastructure Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a repeatable maturity level means that the most important processes have been introduced and the effective structure of the IT process in question is predictable, and the provision of its IT-related services is repeatable.

So what about KPAs associated with Configuration Management?

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