Managing Change - It’s All About the Lifecycle
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:
- streamlining and routing approval processes based on risk and materiality.
- reducing approval activities by screening out unqualified requests.
- reducing time required by standardizing and improving the quality of the requests.
- planning work more efficiently by raising compliance with submission lead time standards.
Execution changes most often involve improving efficiencies by breaking down organization, process and communication barriers around ‘silos’ in IT. Typical improvements come from streamlining and reducing complexity by grouping similar workflows and reducing them to a manageable number. For example, all server upgrades are ‘essentially’ the same, yet many organizations have completely different workflows for each type of server platform.
Executing via common workflows makes the work of IT less customized and more replicable. Gains in efficiency, simplicity, accuracy and service quality are common, along with reductions in cost and risk. These improvements come from
- filtering approval processes based on the risk and materiality of the proposed change.
- reducing approval activities by screening out unqualified change requests.
- reducing work time required by standardizing and improving the quality of the requests.
- planning work more efficiently by getting staff to comply with change submission lead time standards.
The most potential for gain in the area of Change Management Review is usually uncovered by discussing the Change Review process with those performing the review work. For most organizations, effective change review is the most neglected change activity.
Changes that do not fail, but don’t perform well for some reason or other are rarely reviewed. Changes that fail during execution or illustrate themselves as software failures are obvious and should be considered separately. More subtle changes need to be examined separately and root causes examined. Changes that cause serious failures, often evidenced by unplanned downtime or worse, usually do receive in-depth analysis. These often result in major systematic course corrections, but only after the fact, when high costs have been incurred. Red flags should go up for changes that fail during initial execution, but more subtle changes should be investigated thoroughly as well. Many IT organizations operate reactively and thus ignore these more subtle changes, spending the majority of their time on reactive analysis.
Typical improvements come from better change review activities that reduce the number of failures and also reduce the number of changes that fail in execution, thereby reducing the number of ‘near’ failures.
Analysis of the findings in Change Management from the perspectives of basic re-engineering of key, high-volume workflows and key improvement points in each of the four phases of the Change Management lifecycle should point out clear opportunities for business value improvement. These include improvements in service quality, efficiency, accuracy and agility, and reductions in risks and costs.
Register for Evergreen Systems’ Change Management Webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention.
- Don
Along your line of thought, “change management maturity” can help organizations gain significant business benefits from their change management process. We recently conducted research to look at how more mature activities – automating change management, regularly scheduling changes, adopting ITIL change management processes, etc. – help companies limit the problems that changes cause in production. They can also lower the percentage of an IT staff that must support the change management function.
We didn’t look at approvals, but we’d be interested to know how a “mature” approval process would impact business benefits.
Don,
To your point about inadequate reviews of changes - Have you heard of anyone using wlakthroughs of the changes as is sometimes done in the development world to improve the quality of reviews? Also, could you explain to me what you mean by materiality of an RFC?
Thanks,
John
John,
I’ve certainly heard of simulating the effect of changes in the IT environment as part of the CAB function, and in fact, automated impact analysis (which serves the same function but automates the simulation) is a part of almost every ‘best of breed’ CMDB and/or configuration management technology on the market. This represents advanced maturity in the areas of Change and Configuration Management.
By use of the word materiality, what I meant to say is how material (or subtantial) is the change to the overall environment? Are five users affected or will 5,000 users be affected. The (quantified) answer to this question should guide the level/amount/timing of resources that are then devoted to that change.
These topics and lots more are addressed in my white paper, Developing the Business Value of Change, Configuration Management and the CMDB. You can download it at the link below:
http://www.evergreensys.com/downloads/valueofcmdb/
Keep up the good work and let’s keep the dialog going.
Don
I need clarification on this please
• planning work more efficiently by raising compliance with submission lead time standards.