IT Strategy

Change Management Maturity

September 22, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant

IT must implement an effective, mature method of change management or experience significant downtime and negative impact on productivity and profits according to Dennis Powell in his Enterprise Systems article titled Five Keys to Successful Change Management Maturity.

Application and infrastructure change requests of all sizes — from large-scale and important projects to small and low-priority requests — continually inundate IT operations teams. To meet these requests and to be responsive to the business, IT operations teams must fully understand how these changes will impact the day-to-day operations of systems and processes. This brings about a “perfect storm” for IT operations teams: IT and infrastructure changes are necessary in every organization and grow along with business and system expansion, but in organizations with increasingly complex environments, changes can lead to significant service outages and downtime.

Following are the five factors of Change management maturity offering benefits to business operations

1. 1. Change Scheduling: Unscheduled changes are often a major cause of service downtime, especially if the changes are done quickly and without proper testing or screening. Regularly scheduling changes can significantly reduce the number of production problems, the number of IT staff members dedicated to change management, and even the number of emergency changes made.
   2. Automation: The more an organization can automate and schedule changes on a regular basis, the less likely it will be that increases in the number of changes will negatively impact the process.
   3. Process Adoption: Adopting best practices, such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), can go far in helping organizations achieve change management maturity.
   4. Change Testing Environment: Companies that test changes in a formal testing environment are more likely to catch problems that changes might cause. A test environment can be expensive to develop and maintain, but because it provides an available representation of the production environment, the environment provides a more flexible “sandbox” that IT can use to minimize emergency changes and their impact.
   5. Completeness of Change Testing: Testing changes on the entire software infrastructure stack, as opposed to a single component or partial systems, can significantly improve the IT operations team’s confidence in changes and reduce the number of problems caused by the changes.

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