There are several Change Management Metrics that can evaluate if the registered change is on-schedule and all of the approvals have been recorded in time for the change to start. Often the best practice for managing the Change Management Process in accordance to ITIL is to maintain a set of metric based reports that the IT Change Owners and Change Managers can easily retrieve using a self-service portal or tool.
Here are several metrics that may assist your organization in building better insight as to if the Change Management Process is moving the change request through smoothly and if there are any bottlenecks along the way.
Change Management Backlog
Pending Action
This measurement is to determine how many changes are pending an action either by the Change Owner, Change Manager, Approving Authority, Business Owner, Customer, or anyone else associated with the Change Request.
Pending Action Calculation: ($current_date – $last_activity_date) > $max_target_days
A suggested $max_target_days should be between 3 to 5 days. An activity could be as simple as updating the Change Request of if the Change is still on schedule.
Pending Approval
Similar to Pending Action, it is a good practice to have a separate metric that notes how many change requests are still pending approval authority before they can continue.
Pending Approval Calculation: ($approved)=false and $status NOT in {“Rejected” | “Cancelled” | “Closed”}
Alternatively a good metric to use is to also have a departmental based report that each department can run to see if they have change requests awaiting approval from their department.
Pending Approval by Department Calculation: ($approved)=false and $status NOT in {“Rejected” | “Cancelled” | “Closed”} and #department isin $current_pending_approval_groups
Change Management Schedule
Changes Scheduled for Implementation this Week
Most organizations try to schedule a weekly meeting to discuss the IT Changes that will be implemented during the current week. This meeting allows for the Change Managers and Change Owners to come together and formally inform each other of the impact and status for each change. This calculation can be used in preparation for the meeting and/or to build a calendar for business and IT users to stay informed.
Scheduled Changes in Current Week (Assumes 7 day week): $current_date + ’7′ > $implementation_date
This second calculation could be use if the department only works a 5 day work week. You would assume that $day_of_week is the day that that work week begins (i.e. Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2, etc)
Scheduled Changes in Current Week (Assumes 5 day work week): $current_date + (’5′ – $day_of_week) > $implementation_date
Hopefully these simple metrics can help you uncover a few bottlenecks in your organization’s change management process. Remember, using metrics based on ITIL concepts are built on a guidline but do not always represent the best way to report progress in your IT organization. Each metric would need to take into account the capability, capacity, and maturity of the Change Management Process at the organization.
Tags: change management metrics, change management reports, change reporting, itil, itil metrics, itil report, itil reports
Categories: Change Management