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.

The next challenge might be how do I really increase my level of confidence for critical and n-tier changes. Why? Because you can’t totally rely on analysis, sometimes you have to insert and evaluate the change in an actual environment. Obviously you can’t do this in a real production environment but you can in a replicated virtualized environment.

Virtualization allows you to create multiple and different types of abstract or logical servers on real physical machines without dedicating the machine to a particular operating system or application function. I’d be surprised if any IT shop today hasn’t already deployed products like VMware, Virtuozzo, Xen etc. This technology is a great opportunity for change management (and functional testing too) since you can build a replica of your product environment, roll in the change and evaluate the results. These virtual machines can be destroyed if you are simply using it as a lab or it can be migrated directly if you have a virtualized data center. Additionally you can create and restore snapshots for ongoing problem analysis. Ok I admit it’s a fairly advanced topic for the process world of ITIL but if you?re organization is already investing in VMware or similar products then take a look at how this technology can be leveraged to further mitigate change risk.

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