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Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in the change lifecycle.

  • Coordinate IT change and project management to successfully push changes to production.
  • Manage representation of project management within the scope of the change lifecycle to gather requirements, properly approve and implement changes, and resolve incidents that arise from failed implementations.
  • Communicate effectively between change management, project management, and the business.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Improvement can be incremental. You do not have to adopt every recommended improvement right away. Ensure every process change you make will create value and slowly add improvements to ease buy-in.

Impact and Result

  • Establish pre-set touchpoints between IT change management and project management at strategic points in the change and project lifecycles.
  • Include appropriate project representation at the change advisory board (CAB).
  • Leverage standard change resources such as the change calendar and request for change form (RFC).

Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle Research & Tools

1. Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle Deck – A guide to walk through integrating project touchpoints in the IT change management lifecycle.

Use this storyboard as a guide to align projects with your IT change management lifecycle.

2. The Change Management SOP – This template will ensure that organizations have a comprehensive document in place that can act as a point of reference for the program.

Use this SOP as a template to document and maintain your change management practice.


Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in the change lifecycle.

Analyst Perspective

Focus on frequent and transparent communications between the project team and change management.

Benedict Chang

Misalignment between IT change management and project management leads to headaches for both practices. Project managers should aim to be represented in the change advisory board (CAB) to ensure their projects are prioritized and scheduled appropriately. Advanced notice on project progress allows for fewer last-minute accommodations at implementation. Widespread access of the change calendar can also lead project management to effectively schedule projects to give change management advanced notice.

Moreover, alignment between the two practices at intake allows for requests to be properly sorted, whether they enter change management directly or are governed as a project.

Lastly, standardizing implementation and post-implementation across everyone involved ensures more successful changes and socialized/documented lessons learned for when implementations do not go well.

Benedict Chang
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

To align projects with the change lifecycle, IT leaders must:

  • Coordinate IT change and project management to successfully push changes to production.
  • Manage representation of project management within the scope of the change lifecycle to gather requirements, properly approve and implement changes, and resolve incidents that arise from failed implementations.
  • Communicate effectively between change management, project management, and the business.

Loose definitions may work for clear-cut examples of changes and projects at intake, but grey-area requests end up falling through the cracks.

Changes to project scope, when not communicated, often leads to scheduling conflicts at go-live.

Too few checkpoints between change and project management can lead to conflicts. Too many checkpoints can lead to delays.

Set up touchpoints between IT change management and project management at strategic points in the change and project lifecycles.

Include appropriate project representation at the change advisory board (CAB).

Leverage standard change resources such as the change calendar and request for change form (RFC).

Info-Tech Insight

Improvement can be incremental. You do not have to adopt every recommended improvement right away. Ensure every process change you make will create value, and slowly add improvements to ease buy-in.

Info-Tech’s approach

Use the change lifecycle to identify touchpoints.

The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's approach.

The Info-Tech difference:

  1. Start with your change lifecycle to define how change control can align with project management.
  2. Make improvements to project-change alignment to benefit the relationship between the two practices and the practices individually.
  3. Scope the alignment to your organization. Take on the improvements to the left one by one instead of overhauling your current process.

Use this research to improve your current process

This deck is intended to align established processes. If you are just starting to build IT change processes, see the related research below.

Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle

02 Optimize IT Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

01 Optimize IT Change Management

Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in your change lifecycle.

(You are here)

Decide which IT projects to approve and when to start them.

Right-size IT change management to protect the live environment.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.

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You can start as early as tomorrow morning. Our analysts will explain the process during your first call.

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Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.

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Author

Benedict Chang

Contributors

  • Allison Kinnaird, Practice Lead, Infrastructure and Operations, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Christine Coz, Executive Counsellor, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Barry Cousins, Practice Lead, PPM, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Matt Burton, Principal Research Director, PPM, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Ugbad Farah, Senior Product Manager, Info-Tech Research Group
  • 2 anonymous contributors
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