Why itil change management

Therefore, this type of change can be authorized by management or even through peer review. With limited staff availability, the pool of eligible approvers should be flexible. Only then can you be able to quickly resolve emergency changes. We all know that communication is key. This statement is especially true when communicating changes across the organization.

Some organizations like to send out an email to all affected stakeholders, teaching them how the change impacts them. Many may argue that this form of tempered, intellectual, facts-based communication is an ideal way to transmit the message. However, a cold-seeming email may have the opposite effect, leading to more resistance. Certainly, every change communicator experiences resistance once in a while. In truth, no email format exists to solve the problem of resistance.

Some change communicators believe that spamming their colleagues with emails explaining the change multiple times will make them change their mind. In fact, we need a more personal approach that targets each individual emotionally. It often happens a senior manager shares a change and expects that everyone will just understand and accept it. This is not always the case. It might just be because the change should be communicated in a different way.

The message should be tailored to your audience. If your change affects both the marketing and the development departments, it makes sense to write two different emails explaining the details applicable to them in particular. This way, you make sure you communicate the right information to the right people.

Trust is essential for successful change communication. A change must be supported by management and the CAB in order to gain the trust of employees. If there are internal struggles, it will show. This will eventually lead to doubts among the employees about the upcoming change.

Therefore, make sure to communicate a change transparently and honestly, and express trust in the good of the change. For one thing, instead of bombarding your employees with emails, try to be a minimalist.

One concise email is much more effective than 10 follow-up letters. ITIL remains a framework that defines best practices. However, some argue that ITIL is too much about processes.

Change management helps to define a formal way of requesting changes. It also helps assess the risk of a change request. The DevOps team needs to know how a new change will impact the current IT services.

For that, you need to employ agile change management. The DevOps team will probably decide to first deploy this service to a test or separate environment to further assess the impact. It puts an extra workload on your DevOps team. After all, they have to learn about the whole change management process.

Change management requires that every change request comes with documentation about the possible outcomes, risks, and benefits.

This helps the DevOps team keep track of all changes and formally document them. Besides that, change management also defines how the DevOps team has to communicate changes. Some of these policies and process may be borrowed from other best practice frameworks or regulations. Quickly understand key changes and actionable concepts, written by ITIL 4 contributors.

ITIL change management is a process designed to understand and minimize risks while making IT changes.

Businesses have two main expectations of the services provided by IT:. These expectations are in conflict. The objective of change management is to enable IT service management to meet both expectations—to enable rapid change while minimizing the possibility of disruption to services.

Although change management is a process in the Service Transition phase of the lifecycle, the decision about whether to approve a proposed change is sometimes a strategic one, and therefore it is expected that the change management process will work closely with the portfolio management process as necessary.

It does so in the following ways:. The change manager must always be aware of opportunities to make the change management process more efficient. There are two important tools for accomplishing this:. In deciding whether to authorize changes, the change manager is assisted by the change advisory board CAB , which comprises experts in IT technology, finance, and the business.

One of the benefits of using a standardized best-practice framework is in ensuring that employees understand their roles and the procedures that they must follow to deliver services and provide a high level of customer support. Employee knowledge and performance tend to improve with the use of ITIL, and customer satisfaction is higher when customers know what to expect from service. The mission of the IT change management process is to implement changes in the most efficient manner, while minimizing the negative impact on customers when changes are implemented.

The scope of the IT change management process is limited to change implementations that will cause:. Instead, they can be tracked as standard IT activities. Request for change review: Change coordinators use this procedure when they are dealing with requests for change.

Wherever possible, IT organizations should standardize and automate the way that they process requests. There are different types of change requests, or change classes, that are typically managed in different ways:.

Before you begin utilizing ITIL procedures, you will need to assign the following roles to your team:. This section reviews the various procedures that are part of the ITIL change management process. Certain changes may be delayed until sufficient value creation can be proven. This acts as a safeguard that prevents non-value-related criteria from guiding change priorities — for example, if a change was proposed by a specific senior authority.

Some of the language in ITIL 4 that pertains to assessments and authorizations of change seems to go against the grain of agile principles.

For example, the publication notes, "All changes should be assessed by people who are able to understand the risks and the expected benefits; the changes must then be authorized before they are deployed. This assessment, however, should not introduce unnecessary delay.

At second glance, though, this language does not prescribe cumbersome approval processes. It indicates that change decisions should be guided by those best equipped to understand the impact of the change, including value creation versus risk.

The change authority is not necessarily a central authority. The individual can also be a team leader or even a group. Change models must be involved in order to retain agility while still putting every change through some sort of approval process — automated or not.

ITIL 4 strongly implies that a manual review process should be conducted whenever changes are made. However, change models can be implemented into change best practices in order to make this review procedure more fluid. In many cases, the change model can make the review process effortlessly efficient, or completely automated. But once the change is implemented, it can be studied and then used to form the basis of a standard change model.

By using a change model, the next time a similar change is introduced, the approval process can be more streamlined. Using this approach as a guiding framework can have a positive effect on coding practices, encouraging containerization as well as the use of models to reduce unknown variables. Certainly, the entire team or organization should be on the same page for change scheduling, reducing the chances of any type of conflict, confusion, or surprise.