Contact us anytime to know more — Amit A., Founder & COO CISIN
Involvement in change management requires being adept at solving problems while possessing solid workplace skills - something change management professionals tend to excel at.
Change management careers offer potential rewards if one enjoys collaboration, problem-solving or overseeing multiple projects simultaneously.
This article will introduce the various forms of Change Management and how best to apply them in different circumstances.
Furthermore, discover career options within Change Management while learning cost-effective ways of developing skills relevant for today.
Change Management: What Does It Mean?
Change Management (CM) is the practice of overseeing strategic, operational and tactical changes within IT services by using standard processes.
Change management seeks to minimize business disruption while mitigating risks.
Businesses and organizations implement change through practical strategies that incorporate effective change initiatives, which include analyzing reasons for transformational shifts before implementing any necessary adjustments and helping people adapt.
Change can include staffing changes, technology additions, cost cuts or increased profits, among many others.
Organizational Change Management, commonly referred to as OCM, involves looking at how new administrative processes and structural modifications affect people within an organization.
In contrast, Change Management refers to any shift that affects individuals or their activities in an organization's structure. OCM and Change Management often overlap because organizational structures affect individuals' behaviors and processes directly.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Change Management: 4 Types
Change management can be approached in many different ways, just as there are various forms of change. Change can be classified into four types:
Anticipatory
As soon as an organization anticipates change, they make adjustments accordingly. Environmental concerns or trends which the business hopes to capitalize upon often lead stakeholders to expect the need for alteration.
React
Reactive changes occur as a response to business-impacting events like regulations in an industry or modifications necessary for combatting something like Covid-19.
Incremental
Small changes can add up to significant results. A rewards system, altered office hours or flexible work policies are among many examples of incremental progress that could bring more substantial change to an organization.
Strategic
Strategic changes that are implemented at an organizational level and then filtered down to lower levels have an enormous effect.
A restructuring or leadership change would be one such example of a strategic shift that has a far-reaching impact on its recipients.
Evolution Of IT Change Management
Change management (or "change enablement") is an IT practice designed to prevent disruptions of IT services while making necessary modifications to critical systems and services.
Any alteration that could directly or indirectly change services constitutes a change.
Change management practices aim to minimize incidents and meet regulatory standards while efficiently and quickly handling changes to IT infrastructure or code.
Modern change management approaches provide rapid resolutions when things go wrong with code or services while breaking down silos to provide transparency and context, eliminating bottlenecks while mitigating risks.
Change and risk management both require tracking changes that have taken effect and linking them together to create an auditable history of them.
Leveraging data about past changes' successes and failures helps organizations balance risk against speed.
Data-informed adaptive practices seek efficiency over traditional change management, which often proves too long, complex and cumbersome.
Change management usually deals with issues of risk management, compliance auditability and team coordination which make the process bureaucratic and lengthy.
Change management doesn't need to be complicated. With proper culture and practices in place, change can reduce incidents while lessening stress for your team and freeing them up more time for providing value creation.
Why Does IT Change Management Matter?
Modern organizations expect their IT departments to fulfill some competing and stringent expectations, from reliable, stable services that support productivity to meeting user requirements and regular updates that help adapt to ever-evolving business, security and cost requirements.
Meeting such rigorous demands is a significant feat for these IT teams tasked with supporting modern organizations. This task often falls upon IT team heads alone.
Each has severe repercussions for businesses of any kind - being unable to deliver reliable services can have lasting ramifications on productivity and costs alike.
Organizations that need to adapt for the future risk being left behind and falling further behind competitors. Delay in making changes available could cost your employees their jobs at competing organizations with less burdensome systems.
At the same time, customers might send their support elsewhere.
How are these needs managed? Change management practices enable your company to implement updates safely while also maintaining stability and mitigating risks.
They help facilitate transformation by:
- Creating a Structure to Manage the Change Process.
- Allocating resources according to priority is essential.
- Incorporating relevant information for more intelligent decision making.
- Approval of dev/IT projects requires the involvement of all necessary stakeholders.
- Testing changes to prevent incidents.
- The flow of change can be improved to increase the value delivered more quickly.
The Goal Of Change Management
Change Management involves developing standard processes to efficiently handle requests for changes while remaining flexible to mitigate the risk and impact of these alterations on business operations.
Change Management Benefits
Change Management is an invaluable way of controlling risk and protecting the IT services and products you support against errors that might otherwise compromise reliability in today's highly competitive marketplace.
Reliable business systems are essential for the survival of an organization in such an environment; any modifications to IT infrastructure could disrupt productivity or harm service quality - however, implementing structured, planned change processes can minimize these potential risks while adding significant advantages for any organization's survival. Change management offers many benefits, such as:
- Better IT alignment with business.
- Reduced negative impact on business operations.
- Better visibility of IT changes.
- Prioritizing responsiveness to changes.
- Compliance with government regulations.
- Improved risk management.
- Service disruptions are reduced, and systems downtime is minimized.
- Productivity increases for staff.
- Changes are implemented faster.
Change Management And Service Transition
Change Management, part of the Service Management framework, includes guidelines for creating, deploying and transitioning into operation new IT services or those modified.
It also covers retiring services. Service transition is used throughout IT processes to manage risk effectively while offering better decision support to users and businesses alike.
The Service Transition process includes the following:
- Change Management
- Asset and Configuration Management for Service Assets
- Release Management and Deployment Management
- Knowledge Management
- Validation and Testing of Service
- Change of Evaluation
- Transition Support and Planning
Define "Change"
Change refers to any authorized, planned services or components that impact IT Services that require approval, evaluation and implementation with minimal risk.
The change also adjusts configuration items' statuses while creating value for companies and their customers alike. Two methods exist for initiating change:
Change Request Or Request For Change (RFC)
Change requests are formal proposals submitted through an organization stakeholder or user of the service desk and utilized via request fulfillment to modify configuration settings.
Change Proposal
Change proposals are high-level descriptions of proposed services or changes. They must include a business case, implementation plan and schedule information.
Proposals created through Service Strategy service portfolio management typically pass onto the Change Management process for approval and execution.
When making requests for services usually handled by the service desk, change requests can also be submitted as modifications to IT Services, such as adding, changing or retiring components and configurations.
These service requests will then be fulfilled through their request fulfillment processes with change management (and possibly supplier management) involved as needed - most service requests typically involve standard changes anyway.
Types Of Changes
Emergency Change/Urgent Change
Emergency changes must be carefully evaluated and implemented quickly to effectively address a serious incident while being limited, as they often disrupt business and fail.
In terms of change management policies, they must define precisely what constitutes an emergency change.
Changes may arise unexpectedly from errors or threats and must be handled swiftly to maintain services to customers or staff or protect systems against possible threats.
Implementing a security update is one example of an urgent change while dealing with server outages is considered emergency action. Solving major events also falls within this definition. Emergency changes must be addressed quickly due to their urgency; any potential risks involved with prolonged review processes outweigh the advantages gained through rapid resolution.
How you classify changes depends heavily upon your organization's processes and risk tolerance, so we advise rejecting a blanket approach in favor of an individual approach based on an analysis.
As your company gains greater insight into past incidents and systems while gathering relevant data from external sources, they should be more likely to approve an increasing percentage of changes before their being submitted for pre-approval; change requests must remain straightforward.
Standard Change
Standard changes refer to those which occur regularly with minimal risk and follow a documented process. To streamline change management processes more rapidly, regular changes must first be pre-approved by senior leadership; often, this requires the creation of Change Models as a repeatable plan to manage certain types of change within an organization.
As soon as risk levels escalate for your business or organization, regular Changes could become Standard Changes again.
Standard changes involve minimal risk, are repeated frequently and have been approved in advance. They follow an established procedure.
Modifying an operating system typically entails adding memory or storage capacity, changing out a failed router for one that works, or creating an entirely new database.
These changes all follow a similar procedure. Once the change management process, which includes risk analysis and approval, has been completed at least once, no need exists to repeat it for each router replacement project.
Standard changes provide an ideal opportunity to automate. Companies claim that up to 70 per cent of regular changes could be automated, freeing their team up for emergency and non-emergency changes.
Major Changes
Changes with potential financial ramifications or high risks require detailed proposals with supporting financial data to gain approval at each level of management.
Organizations utilize different techniques when it comes to recognizing and overseeing significant business changes that span both operational and tactical or strategic approaches and may necessitate higher approval thresholds from above.
Normal Change
Changes that do not constitute emergencies and lack a predefined, approved process are considered non-emergencies and do not need approval before occurring.
Upgrades and migration to different data centers are frequent changes that must be managed. Other routine changes involve performance enhancement, though these are not standard or repeatable and therefore come with risks that need to be assessed and approved through change management before moving on to something more pressing or urgent.
Switching data centers requires an in-depth risk evaluation by an advisory board; other changes, like updating websites, might only need approval by a designated change authority.
Regular adjustments require significant IT infrastructure changes but need to be more urgent and routine, thus necessitating an in-depth change management review process, including authorization/rejection decisions and consideration by a Change Advisory Board (CAB). Other Change Requests can include the following:
- Applications Changes
- Hardware Upgrades
- Upgrades to software
- Changes to the Network
- Documentation changes
- Environmental Changes
Read More: Implementing Effective Change Management Strategies
Relationship Between Change Management And Release Management
Release management is an integral component of change management, covering everything from software upgrades and training sessions through documentation.
Release management was once used to present customers with changes. But rigid standards can create frustration among teams who follow Agile principles when trying to deliver value updates to clients, thus leading to further frustration amongst these same teams.
Reimagining release management within a DevOps environment is certainly possible. While traditionally thought of as a project-management function, release management should instead become an integration and automation process.
One step toward doing this would be integrating code pipelines in automated reviews and tracking systems - this may help break up siloed approaches while creating a more straightforward path towards production - or it might just simplify the delivery of value continuously through "you built it, you own it".
The IT Change Management Process
IT Change management encompasses all steps involved with designing and executing an organizational change management plan and implementation.
A detailed strategy and set of actions can make transformative projects more successful while making sure all aspects are considered.
Implementing new technology in any company involves more than simply updating technology; an implementation may necessitate changes to organizational structures, recruitment campaigns and even layoffs - these require comprehensive change management processes which must be managed to ensure business survival.
An approved change management procedure is an efficient, economical, and rapid means to managing changes quickly, efficiently and economically.
Service management software may assist in automating this process. At the same time, the Change Control Process forms part of the Change Management Framework by recording, analyzing and authorizing changes as they come about.
Here are the activities typically associated with change management processes:
Create And Log The Request For Change (RFC)
Whoever needs the changes will typically create a Request for Change document (RFC). RFC records vary according to what kind of changes are being proposed; depending on their subject matter, they could include information such as identification data, configuration items descriptions, change request reason(s), contact details of the requestor(s), costs involved with any necessary alterations and timeline(s).
Backout plans could also be included within an RFC record if applicable.
Review Request For Change
Change authorities should review and prioritize each Request for Change according to its business relevance, either returning it as an approval notification to its sender/manager, rejecting it altogether, or sending it back with additional questions if needed for review and further discussion.
Any unapproved changes must also be closely monitored and closed when possible.
Evaluate The Change
To minimize disruption of business operations, it's vitally essential that changes be thoroughly evaluated to ascertain their risk, impact and benefits.
A formal evaluation process for specific changes called Change Evaluation Process has been implemented, which documents these evaluations in a Change Evaluation Report; impact analyses take into account potential effects on operations as a whole as well as IT services (and non-IT ones like customer service), resource availability for implementation as well as planned changes currently planned. Changing evaluation can also take place within Change Advisory Boards, which consist of members such as service owners, technical staff or financial staff to assess whether these modifications are required or not.
Authorize/Approve The Change
Before they're implemented, change requests require approval, which depends on their nature - whether strategic, tactical or operational changes - as well as your organization.
Blessings typically depend on factors like business size, anticipated financial repercussions and scope.
Coordinate Implementation
Change requests or change records must then be handed off to the Release and Deployment process, where it will be coordinated among technical teams or application management for building, testing and deployment of said changes.
In case a change does not go according to plan, remediation plans must be developed accordingly. Once building and testing have concluded, release and deployment should notify the Change Manager of any results or suggested requirements that emerge from these efforts.
Change Managers will utilize an annual Forward Schedule of Changes or Change Schedule as part of their initiative for change planning, informing all relevant parties of impending changes that could affect them.
Coordinating transition requires consideration of both FSC requirements and potential service outages or deviations from service availability; Release and Deployment team will then coordinate any training requirements and implement them appropriately.
Review And Close Change Request
An Implementation Review must take place to ascertain that the changes implemented have fulfilled their intended outcomes, including fixing any identified errors that caused disruptions and developing remediation plans should they prove futile.
As part of this process, an appropriate Change Management Policy must be created. Such policies could cover emergency changes as well as their associated benefits; encouraging an open business culture; assigning roles and responsibilities for various change management tasks; restricting access for change management to authorized personnel only; managing risks appropriately, and measuring performance.
Read More: Utilizing Configuration Management to Implement Change Control
Change Management Roles And Responsibilities
Change Management requires delineated roles and responsibilities that align with organizational requirements for effective change management.
Here is what the Change Management Team might consist of depending on each organization's circumstances:
Change Requestor/Initiator
Individual or unit of business requesting the change.
Change Advisory Board (CAB)
Change Advisory Boards (CABs) are committees composed of representatives from business, finance and technology who meet regularly to evaluate changes that impact them.
A Change Manager/Authority typically leads the CAB. Membership on it typically varies based on what kind of change is being considered, typically including management personnel, customers, consultants, IT office personnel and developers as appropriate for that kind of change being evaluated.
A CAB Agenda serves to prioritize topics for discussion at every meeting. At the same time, an Emergency Change Advisory Board could be quickly assembled when issues require immediate attention - something your policy may also accommodate this formation should include.
A CAB could even improve upon itself.
Change Owner/Manager/Authority
Change Managers or Authorities are in charge of overseeing the Change Management Process, reviewing and authorizing requests to make changes that need more details while rejecting those without enough info.
Both Change Owners and Change Managers/Authorities may coexist in some organizations, with either role having sole responsibility for carrying out its duties; when only one function exists, it assumes all responsibilities simultaneously.
Change Management Key Performance Measures (KPIs)
Successful Change Management programs must measure success against cost reduction and value creation goals, including reliability and availability.
The ability to detect service consumerization, measure the impact of change and demonstrate decreased disruption caused by the change are all indicators that support linking Change Management activities back to business goals and are of critical importance for effective Change Management programs. Change Management metrics and KPIs include the following:
- Improved service marketing
- Number of Successful Changes Implemented
- Reduce the number of service interruptions
- Reduction in unauthorized changes
- The backlog of change requests is reduced
- Changes and incidents
- Time to Implement a Change
- The success rate of change
- The number of incidents (problems, problems) that are caused by failure to change
- Changes in frequency and volume
- The ratio of unplanned vs planned changes
Change Management Best Practices: Adopting Them And Implementing Them
Implementing an effective change management system simplifies managing constant changes. However, change is notoriously challenging to execute successfully - much like any process or strategy undertaking - which necessitates having senior support of change governance for its implementation to reach employees who support your framework and implement your framework successfully.
Furthermore, the value should be communicated throughout its entirety; additionally, an IT Service Management system could assist your processes.
Create A Business Plan
Change Management may seem complex at first glance. Communicating its benefits and purpose throughout an organization can help leaders buy into any change management effort.
Still, for true change management success, all stakeholders must be included.
Define Changes For Your Organization
Select the type and criteria of changes you are going to make.
Define The Key Roles And Responsibilities
Assign clearly defined roles and responsibilities to those participating in the Change Management Process, such as the Change Manager or members of a Change Advisory Board.
Create Your Change Management Processes
Each type of change you identify requires its process to set expectations with requesters and staff alike, which should then be automated using software for management purposes.
Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Determine the metrics that matter to your stakeholders. These can be used to share your successes and demonstrate improvement.
Implement Continual Service Improvement
Regularly audit or review the performance of change management, including people and technologies used. Improvements should then be made to improve operational efficiency.
Understanding Your Risk Tolerance Levels
The maturity of change management processes and organizational governance can measure the success of handling the different types of change.
Which Skills Are Required For Effective Change Management?
It would be best if you had a combination of transferable and specialist skills to be a successful change manager, whether you are an employee or self-employed.
They include:
- Business Management
- Detail-oriented
- Communication at every level is essential
- Leadership and Management
- Negotiations
- Organization
- Process Improvement
- Business management software is a must-have skill
- Project Management
- The Time Management
- Coaching and training
- Building trust and relationships
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
As software-powered services have become more commonplace, customer demand and expectations for high-performance, always-available services have grown significantly.
Furthermore, managing services is becoming progressively more dynamic as their workload expands accordingly.
How can we meet these challenges? Dispelling myths like those suggesting too many processes will reduce risks is the first step, followed by adopting a culture and practices which support collaboration and delivery from your teams, including continuously gathering new data to show benefits from previous actions taken.
