Change Management
Ensure that all changes are communicated, evaluated, and implemented in a controlled manner so that they can respond to changing business needs, and protect the business and other services.
Improvement Planning
Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)
Representative POMs are described for Change Management at each level of maturity.
- 2Basic
- Practice
- Evaluate the impact of proposed changes from an IT perspective.
- Outcome
- Changes undergo a basic evaluation before implementation, but without the involvement of all relevant business stakeholders.
- Metric
- % of proposed changes evaluated.
- Practice
- Put in place basic install, move, add, change (IMAC) processes, with clear responsibilities.
- Outcome
- Employees are aware of their roles and responsibilities with respect to implementing service change.
- Metric
- % of IMAC processes that are formally defined.
- 3Intermediate
- Practices
- Initiate and manage proposed changes to IT services using a change management process.
- Analyse the changes to IT services to identify technical, business, process, and stakeholder impacts.
- Evaluate the impacts using a standardized approach, and prioritize proposed changes according to their positive impact level.
- Outcomes
- Changes to the service catalogue or to SLAs are managed through a change management process — to ensure that changes are not implemented without the overall impact being managed.
- Proposed changes can be assessed, approved, implemented, and reviewed in a controlled manner.
- Metrics
- % of proposed changes evaluated.
- % of proposed changes managed using a formal change management process.
- Practice
- Establish effective IMAC processes and proactively provide information to customers on the status of all requests (e.g. approval, disapproval, time to delivery).
- Outcome
- Customers gain visibility on pending change requests, details of proposed changes, and their status.
- Metrics
- % of IMAC processes that are formally defined.
- % of requests that can be traced with tools.
- 4Advanced
- Practices
- Agree comprehensive evaluation criteria for impact analysis and weight these criteria to align with current business objectives.
- Put plans in place to allow for change reversal and routinely test these plans via a ‘rollback’ process.
- Outcomes
- Use of comprehensive evaluation criteria ensures business value is derived from the approved changes.
- Change reversal is possible if unexpected consequences emerge.
- Metrics
- % of proposed changes evaluated.
- % of proposed changes managed using a formal change management process.
- Practices
- Introduce tool-supported change management — including integration with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to assess change impacts across Configuration Items (CIs).
- Establish automated reporting to business service owners and IT stakeholders and notification to surrounding key processes (e.g. budget management, contract management, capacity management, asset management, technical infrastructure management).
- Outcomes
- Tools support the traceability of all changes across related systems.
- Change adoption is agile and changes are implemented in such a way that much of the work is scripted or automated, so minimizing errors and disruption.
- The management of the build, test, and implementation of changes can be coordinated with the configuration management process and the release and deployment management process.
- Metric
- % of change management activities that are tool-supported.
- 5Optimized
- Practice
- Schedule regular change evaluation reviews and implement improvements based on input from the relevant business ecosystem partners.
- Outcome
- The change evaluation approach is continually improved and kept relevant.
- Metrics
- Frequency of review of the change management process.
- # of evaluation criteria updated.
- Practice
- Ensure the IT service change management process is highly automated, with custom dashboard reporting capabilities to management and service teams, and reflects insights from industry best practice and research.
- Outcomes
- Change management is maintained at a competitive advantage level.
- The structured change management approach delivers effective implementation of changes that minimizes risks and proactively prevents incidents that may be caused by poorly managed changes.
- Metric
- # of incidents caused by poor change management.