IT Change Management

Though there are several types of change management within the industry today, ITIL change management and Agile change management are two of the most common.

ITIL change management: Within ITIL, change management falls under the service transition phase with change evaluation, project management, and release and deployment management. ITIL management is designed to ensure changes are implemented efficiently and effectively to minimize their impact on the functioning of the organization. ITIL change management can be broken down into smaller subprocesses.

Many of these subprocesses are rolled into the overall ITIL management process, which includes the following:

• Change management support
• Assessment of change proposals
• RFC logging and review
• Assessment and implementation of emergency changes
• Change assessment by the change manager
• Change assessment by the Change Advisory Board
• Change scheduling and build authorization
• Change deployment authorization
• Minor change deployment
• Post-implementation review and change closure

Agile change management: Unlike ITIL change management’s rigid structure, Agile change management is more fluid. Instead of consolidating the change management steps under a single umbrella held by one central team, it divides change management activities among various project owners. “Speed” in Agile change management is measured by how quickly employees can get up and running versus the rate at which the change is implemented. While IT change management software is often built with ITIL in mind, these platforms offer several services (including workflow automation) also capable of facilitating Agile change management.

No two change management processes are exactly the same. In fact, businesses are encouraged to customize their change management processes to ensure they fit their goals and objectives. The most important thing is having a process in place—one management has signed off on—to ensure each change implementation follows a standard set of procedures. 

So, what are the essential elements of change management? Most ITIL change management processes follow some variation of these five steps:

1. Identify the change: Employees submit requests to the IT help desk every day. Some of these requests are for simple incidents pertaining to forgotten passwords, files not downloading, or faulty web browsers, but others are more complicated. Large problems and significant change requests can shake up the entire IT environment. Common change initiatives include the release of a new company-wide technology or the implementation of a new security best practice. 
2. Evaluate the impact: It’s important for IT administrators to review potential changes to identify the number of employees they will impact and what the impact will be. The level of change evaluation conducted varies greatly depending on the type of change in question. Larger changes often require a more formal change evaluation, one in which an official Change Evaluation Report is produced. During these evaluations, new changes are examined to determine their potential impacts on the business’s bottom line, IT infrastructure, scheduled upcoming changes, and operational aspects of IT and non-IT services. 
3. Approve or deny the change: Whether a change is approved is based on its operational and economic impact. Changes designed to boost productivity, increase operational efficiencies, streamline processes, and contribute to the overall success of the organization are typically approved. However, a request for a significant change typically requires authorization before it can be made. The individuals providing this authorization vary depending on the organization and whether the change is strategic, tactical, or operational in nature. Smaller changes rarely have to go through a rigorous approval process, especially since more minute change requests don’t run the risk of financial repercussions. 
4. Implement the change: The level of detail within the implementation process is generally determined by the size of the company and the scope of the change. Large-scale organizations commonly rely on dedicated change management employees to facilitate any changes. Smaller companies, on the other hand, turn to their day-to-day IT departments to test changes, ensuring they run without a hitch, before launching a full-scale deployment. Change schedules are commonly used in organizations of all sizes to keep employees at every level, from the C-suite on down, aware of impending changes and how they’ll be affected. 
5. Review and report on the change: It’s important for IT administrators to conduct a thorough evaluation of changes after they’ve been implemented. These detailed reviews are designed to reveal potential user concerns and whether the change was launched successfully. Changes that fail to live up to the IT administrator’s standards must be addressed through a remediation plan. Typically, these plans are produced well in advance to minimize the impact of a faulty change on end users. But while having a remediation plan in place is important, conducting a comprehensive impact analysis prior to the change launch is the best way to safeguard against potential errors. 

SolarWinds^® Service Desk is designed to support IT change management with its change and release management modules. These modules can be configured to support every step of your company’s service management process, helping you ensure every change is implemented as smoothly as possible. 

Through the platform’s CMDB, you can gain in-depth visibility into the technology infrastructure of your entire organization. Additionally, the platform makes it easier to identify the connections between users, assets, and any other configuration items and better understand how each employee will be impacted by scheduled changes. With this information, you can alert employees well in advance to ensure they have as much time as possible to prepare. The more you communicate with your employees, the smoother the change management process will be for all parties involved. 

SolarWinds Service Desk can also help facilitate the change management process through its robust change history. Retaining historical data allows users to track and store changes, root causes of problems, and the actions taken during the implementation process. Building on your historical data can help save your team the effort and time involved in trying to remember what worked and what didn’t, allowing them to focus on continuously improving and evolving. 

But this isn’t the only way Service Desk can help drive greater efficiency within the IT change management process. Its intelligence software can also help you identify changes with similar traits, and it combines these factors into a single release to streamline deployments and reduce the need for multiple outages. 

SolarWinds Service Desk is designed to make the end-user experience—a pivotal consideration within any IT change management process—a top priority. The Employee Service Portal in Service Desk can serve as a communication hub for IT technicians and employees across departments. On the IT side, technicians can use the portal to send employees detailed alerts regarding potential disruptions and even provide status updates throughout the entire change management process. This helps ensure employees are kept aware of need-to-know information. From an employee perspective, the portal can be leveraged to more easily submit incident, problem, and change requests. If an urgent problem requires immediate attention, the portal can provide a 24/7 direct line of communication to service providers and a knowledge base where they can access resources to resolve known issues.