Change Management

Net.works and Evergreen are merging!!

Well this is very big news for us.  You often hear of mergers of equals, and you don’t believe it.  Well you can believe this.  Both companies are the same size and are in highly complementary market spaces.  

Both company names have strong brand equity within the HP customer and partner community, but the executives of both companies decided to trade as Evergreen Systems given its stronger brand recognition in the market at large (marketing dollars and blogs at work).  But the real question is…what value does this bring to you, our customers? 

To answer that let’s look at what is happening in IT operations.  For many organizations, ITIL principles are well on the way to being adopted, and a strong focus / desire exists to run as IT as one organization, not many distinct silos.  This focus on IT service management / delivery across IT has led to an uptick in technology buying to enable the new enterprise processes.  

But still, improvement is often slow and hard to measure.  Why?  We have service catalogs to streamline IT services ordering but executing those orders is still difficult.  We have improved change process management but executing those changes end to end is still laborious and largely manual.  We have the same detailed actions occurring in every IT silos thousands of times each year, and yet these actions are sill largely manual.  We are trying to respond from request to outcome—and yet we still have not done simple business process re-engineering from start to finish on repetitive requests.  

It is time for another big leap.  It is time to dig into the high volume processes underneath ITIL best practices, re-engineer them, and truly automate them end to end.  We must put the work into the technology. 

Our merger powers this idea.  Evergreen brings the ITIL experience, the process re-engineering, the IT service management experience, the service catalog (demand management), and the change management.   Net.works joins us at change management, bringing the configuration management experience, the end client management and automation, and the data center (server) management and “run book” automation.

Together we believe we can truly lead our clients to measurable, quantum leaps in productivity, agility, accuracy, proactivity, compliance, security, and quality—along with a significant reduction in risk.  

So how about…Let’s Automate!  Its now time.   

Don Casson

CEO Evergreen Systems, Inc.

We’ve been talking lots lately about Change management, so I have a question for all of you out there who feel like all you do is fight fires.

How many Changes does your organization make per month? Now think of the impact on the business. Are you pushing more than 500 changes per month? Do you feel like you’re fighting fires instead of preventing them?

If this is a topic on your mind, then I hope you’ll join me tomorrow, October 16 at 10AM (PDT) 11AM (MDT) 12PM (CDT) and 1PM(EDT) for our HP and Evergreen sponsored webinar on Change Management – taking it from firefighting to fire prevention.

Register for the webinar and learn how to Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention.

The agenda includes:

• Best practices on Change control lifecycle management.
• Change acceleration with reduced complexity, cost and increased ROI.
• Real-world success stories on managing Change.
• Optimization of CAB efficiency and effectiveness.
• A fast tour demo of HP’s integrated ServiceCenter, Change Control Management and uCMDB bundle.

Change will also be address in the context of workflow analysis, CI (configuration item) collision and the importance of a universal CMDB.

Hope you’ll be able to join us!

Don

Register now and Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention.

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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The emphasis today around Change Management is establishing a good workflow to speed up the request and approval process. All well and good, but let’s fast forward and declare that part of journey over and pretend we’re so efficient that we can submit and approve 50 change requests a day. While we’re at it, let’s also assume you are also proficient at detecting and resolving collisions among a batch of RFCs.

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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:

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Last time I shamelessly teased you by stating that speed, quality and cost can all be improved at the same time. Now I’ll tell you how I’ve seen it done in real-world IT shops.

Here’s the secret: they implemented strong, mature ITIL-based Configuration, Change and Release Management.

Here’s why it works: as I said, these three processes are tightly linked at almost every step.

For example, your planned changes (RfCs or Requests for Change) are assessed for impact and risk and which Configuration Items (CIs) are involved by using the relational data about your infrastructure that?s stored in your CMDB (Configuration Management Database).

Then, the Change Management process hands off the actual implementation of many (but not all) changes to the Release Management process, which is responsible for building, testing and implementing the actual changes to the infrastructure.

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When we’re working with clients to help them map out a long-term plan for ITSM (IT Service Management) using ITIL best practices as a guide and benchmark, one of the most important questions is “Which ITIL process should we work on first? Second?”

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Which comes first, Change and Configuration, or Service Catalog and Service Level Management?

This is a trick question. I’ll give you the answer later. And it’s also the actual decision we’re facing right now as Phase 1 of this client’s ITSM initiative wraps up and Phase 2 planning is in full gear. Based on the current state assessment, I personally think the most business value “bang for the buck” is in improvements to Change and Configuration Management.

But there are some important reasons why SLM and Service Catalog are important too. Those reasons are key Directors in the organization, who have a vote in the budgeting decision for Phase 2. And they also have specific objectives of their own that they want to get completed as soon as possible.

Our project sponsor understands all of this, and agrees that from the ITIL perspective, and more importantly from the business value point of view, Change and Configuration should be tackled next. But he also understands that “The other Directors understand why Change and Configuration Management are important, but they don’t see why they need to be addressed first. However, what they do understand is why their Service Level Management and Service Catalog goals are immediately important.”

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Many IT organizations have implemented some form of Change Management but fewer have implemented a formal release management process successfully. Yet, most incidents are caused by poorly planned and/or tested releases. Why? Because several prerequisites to a sound release management program have not been addressed.

Here are a few:

1. Develop a clear set of expectations with application development organization on timing, lead times, risk, end-user training and infrastructure readiness state, ensuring smooth, planned launches. It is quite impossible to have effective releases of applications without a cooperative effort between infrastructure and application development. Even with the onslaught (or rebirth) of Agile application development processes, this cooperation must be in place to ensure quality services.

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