Change Management - the ITIL way

Many organizations with small IT department, often fail to establish standardized methods and policies to manage change. As a result, they resort to haphazard and ad-hoc practices resulting in utter mismanagement of IT changes. We all recognize that changes in the IT may arise out of some reactive responses to problems, or as exogenously imposed requirements, e.g. legislative or regulatory imperatives, or out of proactive quests for improved efficiency ,or just as business improvement initiatives.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) defines, among other areas of service management, a set of standard operational management procedures and practices to allow the organization to manage changes within IT infrastructure. ITIL was originally created by an agency CCTA under the auspices of the British government, and ITIL is a registered trademark of the UK Government's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).The challenges and risks in successfully managing IT changes are many. For many successful IT departments or divisions, the ITIL Change Management doctrines work as the guiding principles, which integrate iteself seamlessly with its associated network of service management forces like configuration management, service desk, request management, service catalog management, service level management and others.

The critical success factors in IT Change Management are basically dependent on the organization's capability in controlling IT changes, protecting existing services during the change implementation and its aftermath, and also effecting quick and accurate changes based on business requirements. The goals of ITIL aligned Change Management process embrace many aspects - setting the policies and guidelines as a framework of methods and techniques of efficient change handling, structurally creating role-based incumbents as change manager(s) or change coordinator(s), formalizing a change assessment and approval examination body often known as Change Advisory Board(CAB), making visible a Forward Schedule of Changes (also known as change calendar), publishing contextual service availability reports and , among other things, communicating pre and post change notifications and performing post-change review.

Is it necessary to have a tool or application to control IT Change Management? Not necessarily. But it is absolutely necessary to have a well-defined process and a set of strictly enforced guidelines. That is why ITIL principles are basically process-driven, which can be practiced without any ITIL compliant Change Management application, or tool. The ITIL key-activities recommend who, how, when to (i) register and accept proposed changes,(ii) classify, prioritize changes,(iii) perform risk and impact assessment, (iv) coordinate change approval,(v) schedule and coordinate change implementation,(vi) conduct post-change review, and (vii) periodically disseminate management information and reports. One critical aspect of change management is obviously to mitigate any change-related risk. It is necessary to have a clear visibility into the relationship-network of all the services and applications. The question is to ask: how many applications/services are to be directly or /indirectly impacted by this change? The next question is to know: in the context of the enterprise how critical are theses services? If this assessment leads to an answer that the proposed change is fraught with risk, proper mitigation policies should be in place.

Controlling of unauthorized changes to the CIs in the CMDB repository is another important aspect of change control. Often urgency factors, in absence of clear guidelines, might force the stakeholders to introduce changes without any record, with impactful consequences. The ITIL change management traps and prevents such mishaps through procedural guidelines. For urgent changes, ITIL recommends setting up of an ECAB or Emergency Change Advisory Board, to eliminate any frenzy of adhocism that might associate with emergency change management.

Every IT organization or division progresses through different stages of maturity over time. This maturity, by and large, is assessed and measured by the organizational resilience, its investment in technology, process-improvement methodologies and skill-enhancement programs to provide better IT services to the enterprise. Evidently, commitment to the best practices encapsulated in the ITIL framework will substantially strengthen the backbone of any IT department to scale higher standards of efficiency and effectiveness.