Your Challenge

• Infrastructure managers and change managers need to re-evaluate their change management process due to slow change turnaround time, too many unauthorized changes, too many incidents and outages because of poorly managed changes, or difficulty evaluating and prioritizing changes.
• IT system owners often resist change management because they see it as slow and bureaucratic.
• Infrastructure changes are often seen as “different” from application changes, and two (or more) processes may exist.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• ITIL provides a usable framework for change management, but full process rigor is not appropriate for every change request.
• You need to design a process that is flexible enough to meet the demand for change, and strict enough to protect the live environment from change-related incidents.
• A mature change management process will minimize review and approval activity. Counterintuitively, with experience in implementing changes, risk levels decline to a point where most changes are “preapproved.”

Impact and Result

• Create a unified change management process that reduces risk and takes a balanced approach toward deploying changes, while also maintaining throughput of innovation and enhancements.
• Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
• Establish and empower a change manager and change advisory board with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.
• Establish easy-to-follow intake, assessment, and approval processes, and ensure that there is visibility into changes across the organization.