In today’s highly competitive service desk market, IT change management has emerged as a “must-have” requirement for organizations, regardless of size. By definition, IT change management is an ongoing business process that enables organizations to continuously manage change within their IT environment.

 

At the core of a change management strategy is the need to align personnel and business processes with minimum disruption to IT services. However, controlling change within today’s complex and distributed IT environments is challenging and requires the right blend of management infrastructure, business processes and workflow, and technology.

 

IT change management continues to be a critical issue for C-level technology executives as well as the network administrators who perform the task. The ultimate result of a proven IT change management initiative is business agility, efficiency and greater performance. With so many variables involved in the IT change management equation, organizations must take a proactive, multi-step approach to be effective.

 

When confronted with the question, “Why I should implement change management now?” IT professionals should have plenty of reasons to consider. The emergence of industry trends, such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), and the continued growth of external regulations—including SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)—are just a few reasons that can impact change.

 

Industry analyst firm Forrester Research (News - Alert) validates the importance of change management in a recent report on the topic: “The goal of the change management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for the efficient and prompt handling of all changes. This allows the IT organization to control the flow of changes and minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, consequently improving the day-to-day operations of the IT organization.”

 

With an abundance of technology options to ponder—especially advanced help desk and service management solutions—the following eight steps can serve as a guideline to selecting the best solution for your organization’s change management needs.

 

 

1. Create a change management infrastructure within your organization. As recommended by the ITIL framework, organizations should establish a Change Advisory Board (CAB) consisting of IT and business staff, including executive and departmental managers. This ensures a solid foundation for your change management processes.

 

2. Select a change management software aligned with the needs of your organization. Choose a solution that is flexible, scalable and easily customizable. The solution must support varying types of change and approval processes. This solution must also interface to other Service Management processes for access to configuration information, analysis of incident and problem trends, and impact assessment and review.

 

3. Centralize change management processes. This step is a key ingredient to effectively track end-to-end change management and the ability for organizations to centralize all requests so that changes are effectively planned, handled, managed and tracked in accordance with best practices.

4. Create customizable ITIL-compliant approvals and workflows. A robust solution will allow you to create an unlimited number of approval processes with different phases and multiple approvers—all based on your organizations specific operations and workflow. Your solution should also enable you to customize workflows, as well as approval tools.

 

5. Automate your approval processes. Workflow automation should facilitate the assignment of change-related tasks, such as approval and implementation, to the responsible parties and notify the appropriate parties of a change request. Instant notifications, automated email reminders, etc. are important features and functionality that must be supported by your change management system.

 

6. Minimize downtime and disruption. An effective solution should allow administrators to schedule changes within a calendar. This will ensure users are not impacted by applications or servers that may need to be taken off-line for routine upgrades and maintenance.

7. Continually monitor effectiveness. To evaluate the performance of change management, your solution must track, measure and report the speed and effectiveness with which the IT responds to identified business needs. There are a number of key performance indicators that need to be tracked and reported on to allow management to make timely and accurate decisions.

 

8. Continually evaluate change workflow and metrics. To complete an audit trail, your solution must track and manage all changes throughout their lifecycles. Reporting tools are pivotal in capturing key metrics and identifying positive/negative trends. Reporting tools will also prove useful during an audit.

 

 

Leveraging these eight steps offers a comprehensive framework to effectively address the dynamics associated with change management. Doing so will improve business agility, boost IT service quality, increase employee productivity and customer service, reduce costs, and most importantly enable organizations to keep pace with change.

 

IT departments, specifically the help desk, typically inherit the responsibility of change management. As organizations reduce budgets and embrace the “do more with less” business mantra, selecting the right help desk or service management solution can make all the difference.

 

Once change management initiatives have taken root within an IT department, organizations can extend these programs to additional departments based on best practices and knowledge leveraged from the initial rollout. By implementing an effective change control process and deploying a dynamic change automation solution, an organization can optimize IT assets and closely align them with the people and processes that support their operations.