By Thad Hunter

Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.

New methods and enabling technology have matured over the last year and deserve your consideration.

Change management is how you balance technical and business risk, not merely how you pump change requests through an administrative process. We can thank ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) for renewing attention on our important, albeit unglamorous, operational processes. While ITIL offers a structured set of best practices or services, it is not a solution; however, it is a jump-start and a useful lever to generate awareness.

So what justifies re-engineering your current change process? Errors while inserting changes into production amplify throughout the enterprise with costly if not embarrassing consequences. Fill in your favorite episode here…we all have them. Changes and maintenance activities can account for 40 percent of IT people cost. Unfortunately most organizations fail to track these costs, which would seem to be a missed opportunity to justify budgets and the need for technology upgrades. Change events afford excellent learning opportunities for improvement projects. Visibility, everyone working off the same page and reliable configuration data all contribute to less rework and better business relationships.

The value proposition is real but redesigning change management is not trivial. Modifying a key operational process requires designing new workflows, defining new roles and responsibilities, collecting different data, managing service levels, acting on feedback from dashboards and integrating disparate databases. Afford your operational processes the same attention and formality that you afford a business application but also expect your IT staff to struggle when it comes to designing their own internal processes.

Before moving on to specific ideas, take note of the following prerequisite technologies, some of which are new and fairly complex:

• CMDB (configuration management database)—a database application that organizes configuration items (CIs), their attributes and interrelationships to answer the fundamental question “what’s there now?”
• CMDB end-user functionality that supports impact calculation, event tracking, dependency correlation among CIs, snapshots, versioning and ad hoc view creation.
• Configuration management process supported by a formal role.
• Discovery technology that’s extensible to continuously discover your particular environment, from wires through high-level business applications.
• Process automation tools including workflow, forms (here the RFC, or request for change), roles and dashboard capabilities.