Change management

Change Management Process Overview
(part of the Service Transition stage of the ITIL Service Lifecycle)

Change Management Process Approach

Changes are made for a variety of reasons and in different ways – for example:

• Proactively, e.g. when organisations are seeking business benefits such as reduction in costs, improved services or increased ease and effectiveness of support.
• Reactively as a means of resolving errors and adapting to changing circumstances.

Changes should be managed in order to:

• Optimise risk exposure (supporting the risk profile required by the business)
• Minimise the severity of any impact and disruption
• Achieve success at the first attempt.
• Ensure that all stakeholders receive appropriate and timely communication about the change so that they are aware and ready to adopt and support the change.

Such an approach will improve the bottom line for the business by delivering early realisation of benefits (or removal of risk), while saving of money and time.

Change Management Process Purpose

The purpose of the Change Management process is to control the lifecycle of all changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT services.

Change Management Process Objectives

The objectives of change management are to:

• Respond to the customer’s changing business requirements while maximising value and reducing incidents
• Disruption and re-work
• Respond to the business and IT requests for change that will align the services with the business needs
• Ensure that all changes are recorded and evaluated and that authorised changes are prioritised, planned tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner
• Ensure that all changes to configuration items (CIs) are recorded in the configuration management system
• Optimise overall business risk – it is often correct to minimise business risk, but sometimes it is appropriate to knowingly accept a risk because of the potential benefit

Definition of a Change

Change can be defined in many ways.  QM IT Services adopts the ITIL definition where a change is ‘the addition, modification or removal of anything that could have an effect on an IT service(s)’.