Why Change Management?

Without knowing how things are organized in your environment and how they relate to each other, it’s hard not only to make team decisions but also to deploy business factors.
Every function does some change, like defect, development and enhancement.

Change management and IT asset management are the two practices that can deliver the biggest and quickest potential gains both in terms of reduced cost and improved efficiency.
For e.g.; you go for a meeting to discuss about earlier release and new release. You need to have track of earlier changes and current. Would you take spread sheet and do all manual process to stuff the data inside. Then I would say you are late buddy, your release date would have been gone past already before you step into pre release meeting J

Poor Change Management:
Even though you have CM in process, but a poor management will have no impact on business results.

Loss of employee productivity leads to increased audit fees and production fines which further leads to lost revenue, market share and finally the loss of customer confidence. Are you ready to risk all these factors?

So you agree with me and already analyzed to go for a change management tools. Sounds good, but have a pit stop and think about the factors induce poor management of change control tools before proceeding further.

Here goes… Factors like unauthorized changes, unplanned outages, low change success rate, high number of emergency changes, delayed project implementations.
So remember change management doesn’t mean that just version controlling of code snippets. It broadens to all the factors above and it penetrates to project management too.

Process Definition:
We define process and you follow it.
Here is a simple example,
IT budgeting and strategy will be split in the following way.70% of the budget actually spent just on keeping the light on J (Just maintenance and support- I mean the operations). 10 % for strategy and 20% for application. What happen there is you just fuelling the engine to run and not reinvesting to maximize the profit margin? So what you have to do here is to automate the some of the IT operation piece of change, to be able to shift those cost out of operation and reinvest them to fuel your strategic initiatives and this brings the IT operations as value center align with the business. Here comes the change management to help you. This frees you to focus on your business.

So talking about IT operation, basically your Service or Helpdesk is the starting point of that and occupies 40 to 50 %. Performance and availability covers around 20 % and our guy change management to 40 %. But when we look at where companies are starting to move, really there are focusing on CM and one of hard area and pain in the nose for them.


The Road Map:

Let me put up a question for you, what process or plan you are going to implement on this year?

Is it on service desk, incident or problem management, change configuration and release management, only configuration management, marketing strategy, resource utilization? May be you don’t have any plans at all this time and planning to surviveJ. Let me come to the point you would have rated nearly 70% for change config and release management followed by incident /problem management and service desk. Am I right?

Hmm slowly am getting into your mind. So optimize your business success by managing change and configuration management together. Still you won’t abide with me! Then just give me the solution for this. How do you deploy a software update or critical patches to thousands of devices in a single day? 15 thousands in a month, bunch of defects which almost equal t the entire Hartford population etc etc. This will take you up to 4 to 6 months to do it by manual. Here comes the process and the automation of change management. Got it buddy!

Now you want to know what is change management and the life cycle or the architecture behind this. See you are on the same road and asking about CM. Welcome to the party..!
CM life cycle will be split into Plan, Deliver and operate. Every face of SDLC have change management tools to take control. They vary from specific area expertise like defect, version control, build or end to end CM tool. So you are hitting every part of the SDLC. You are having fun!

You have various CM tools like Rational ClearCase, HP change management, SVN, CVS, StarTeam which are widely used depend upon project structure.

Is it Repeatable process?

And at one point of time, people feel that CM is a repeatable process. I model it, schedule it, get approval, implement, verify and deploy it. The same work i do everyday and where is the fun part. Then i say it’s not the way of doing work. Always ask What, When, Where, How and Why? Everyday you will get different answers and you are back to business. We're riding a bus and the driver is assuring us that he knows where he's going. Game on..!

As mentioned on the beginning, the impact of CM will be better business decisions and successful deployment of business product.

P.S: Need expert comments…Here we are…Center of Excellence!!!