The purpose of Change Management is to ensure that all methods and processes are standardized across the Information Technology Enterprise. Utimately through using Change Management, an organization and establish a controlled environment to record, evaluate, authorize, prioritize, plan, test, implement, document, and review changes to the IT Infrastructure.
There are two main goals of change management:
- Respond to the business’ goal of reducing downtime while increasing productivity
- Respond to IT Requests that will better align the services of IT and the needs of the business
A change can arise because it is a proactive or a reactive measure. A proactive change is making a change to benefit the business. This could be deploying a new application, upgrading an operating system, or an enhancement to an existing IT Service. A reactive change is a change that is used as a means to resolve an error. This could be a change such as restarting a server, applying a software patch, or replacing a failed hard disk.
The Change Management Process is often managed by a Change Manager and approval for changes are authorized by a Change Advisory Board (CAB). The size and personnel needed to manage the Change Management process is often scalable and dictated by the size of the organization. Typically the process is centralized, however, often smaller organization will have a change management process that is informal. An informal process would be like one that sends a simple email to several other employees and/or is notes jotted down in a notebook.
IT Change Management Example:
Your Web Application Department is part of an IT Division that oversees a Judiciary Branch for a major metropolian city. The goal of your organization is to keep the Judiciary Branch’s website operational for the public as well as internal intranet users. At times you will need to restart the Web server to add memory or to add hard disk space as more users use the website. Change Management can help control who and when a modification is made to that server. If you use a controlled change management process, the system administration will have to notify all of the business users and IT support staff when they move the server offline. The Change Management process would also require there to be a paper trail of documentation for what modification was made to the server as well as who made the modifications. Change Management can really assist even a department from costly unplanned downtime and unavailablity of the servers.
Tags: Change Management, government technology, it change management, it changes, it service management, itil, itil for change management, itil for judicial, judicial technology
Categories: Change Management