CHANGE, What should and should not do for successful Change Management
A change is defined as anything—hardware, software, system components, services, documents, or processes—that is deliberately introduced into the production environment and which may affect a service level agreement (s) or otherwise affect the functioning of the environment or one of its components. The goal of a successful Change Management process implementation is to reduce the amount of unplanned work as a percentage of total work done. Organizations that are in a constant firefighting mode can have this percentage at 65 percent or even higher. Change is a long long process and organization (s) must taken it seriously. In this particular post, I will stick with the do's and dont's of change management process.
Critical questions that need to be answered are:
- Who made the change?
- What did they change?
- Should it be rolled back? If so, then how?
- How do we prevent it from happening again in the future?
Items to do:
- Do post-implementation reviews to determine whether the change succeeded or not.
- Do track the change success rate.
- Do use the change success rate to learn and avoid making historically risky changes.
- Do make sure everyone attends the meetings, otherwise auditors have a good case that this is a nonfunctioning control.
- Do categorize the disposition of all changes. In other words, all outcomes must be documented once a change is approved. Three potential outcomes are:
- Change withdraw - the change requester rescinds the change request along with the reason why. This should not be flagged as a failed change in change metrics.
- Abort - the change failed, accompanied by documentation of what went wrong.
- Completed successfully - the change was implemented and is functioning appropriately.
Items not to do:
- Do not authorize changes without rollback plans that everybody reviews. Changes do fail, so be proactive and think ahead about how to recover from a problem rather than attempting to do so during the heat of firefighting.
- Do not allow rubber stamping approval of changes.
- Do not let any system changes off the hook - someone made it, so understand what caused it.
- Do not send mixed messages. Bear in mind that the first time the process is circumvented, incredible damage can be done to the process. "Well heck, we did it last time" or the boss said, "just do it" - both send the wrong messages.
- Do not expect to be doing closed loop Change Management from the start. Awareness is better than being oblivious, and managed is better than unmanaged. Start with a particular class of changes and constantly refine the process.
Change is needed to meet today's requirements. We cannot move further with past policies & techniques, today 7 tomorrow, as time is changing. "The goal of a successful Change Management process implementation is to reduce the amount of unplanned work as a percentage of total work done."
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