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

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:

• Using a spreadsheet, interview those involved from end to end to create the ‘as-is’ process state. Review the workflow for unnecessary steps, duplicative activities, excessive manual activities, excessive delays and rework caused by inaccuracies and errors due to poor end-to-end understanding and communication.
• Build the desired state by devising the most simple, streamlined approach to meet the business requirements and assume the use of basic Change Management technology to automate communications and workflow.
• Measure the expected change in efficiency and elapsed time.

This kind of measurable gain can go a long way in convincing executive management to invest in re-engineering change management in your IT organization.

I’d love to hear how you calculate business gains from re-engineered change processes in your organization.

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

Joe

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? The main purpose of Configuration Management is to establish and maintain the integrity of products that are subject to or part of IT services. Configuration Management involves the identification of the relevant hardware and software components that need to be put under configuration control. Changes to the configuration are evaluated with respect to the service level agreement and with respect to possible risks for the integrity of the configuration.

A Configuration Management plan covers the Configuration Management activities to be performed, the schedule of the activities, the assigned responsibilities, the resources required (including staff, tools and computer facilities) and the CM requirements and activities to be performed by the service delivery group and other related groups

With all these things in mind, you may be able to develop and benchmark your Configuration Management KPAs using the following questions. Remember that each question has three possible answers of (1) consistently (2) inconsistently (3) never. Which category your answers fall into will quickly steer your assessment of configuration management maturity as either consistent (repeatable), inconsistent or having no organized approach

Try your hand at some of these questions and see how your organization ranks against best practices.

Keep up the good work until next time.

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

Don

• Is a Configuration Management plan prepared for each service according to a documented procedure?
• Is a documented and approved Configuration Management plan used as the basis for performing the Configuration Management activities?
• Is a Configuration Management library system established as a repository for the configuration base lines?
• Are the products to be placed under Configuration Management identified?
• Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure?
• Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure, by an automated process or toolset?