ITIL Change Management – whatever!!! : ITILNews.com

ITIL Change Management – whatever !!! [4 comments]

The world media are having a feeding frenzy after an IT software change at a major banking organization in the UK failed, disrupting many payments into and out of customers accounts, primarily locking their funds for several days.

Numerous stories were published regarding members of the public unable to purchase groceries, pay bills and in some cases complete on the purchase of real estate.

Bank staff located in the branches were requested to work Sunday in an attempt to assist its impacted customers, providing cash advances in some cases.

Five days after the event the media was still publishing stories. The bank is promising to pay any costs incurred, work with various agencies to ensure none of its customers are black listed and eventually some form of compensation may also be forth-coming.

The full cost of this 'disaster' has yet to be established, let alone the damage to the level of customer confidence and ultimately the credibility of the bank. Some members of staff will loose their jobs as shareholders seek some form of justice.

So when you are trying to convince members of staff and suppliers of the merits of ITIL Change Management and the inclusion of a post implementation 'verification plan' then this current day example may just help to focus the mind.

4 VISITOR COMMENTS

2012-08-11 by "tonuttyme"

If an organisation handles 600 changes in a week, is a post implementation review for all changes possible?

Reply on 2012-11-13

(from shirad_s)

It depends based on what are the changes. Are these SW, HW, policies, configurations, a combination of all and other things ... etc?

All in all, it is possible with the following conditions:

1. You have a mirror of the production environment, or one that is fairly close to that, to test and rollback if any problem occurs

2. Prioritize the changes and deploy them and their dependencies in point 1 in a planned manner. Best is that you don't deploy all of the changes together as they might break the system and you won't be able to easily and quickly detect what caused this to raise a problem incident. So deploying one a time, or a group of changes that are guaranteed not to conflict (with minimal to no risk#, is the best approach, and this also allows you to distribute testing for the confirmed changes

3. Work with the project managers to develop a comprehensive test plan and schedule testing in a timely manner and in parallel to the daily and continuous existing changes

4. Allocate the right resources that comprehend the business and technical side, so they'd understand the purpose of the test and run it with no gaps

5. Review the results through reporting, and adjust changes where necessary #This is iterative)

6. Plan the deployment of the confirmed changes, and ensure you have a rollback plan, i.e., the change might fail due to a high bandwidth in the production environment compared to the one for testing. So some tweaking might be needed to support more processing, multithreading ... etc, for example in a SW component.

All of the above need to be planned, standardized, and approved ahead of time and not while you are executing the processes. Keep in mind that resources need also to be trained on the testing procedure to perform well and report the issues ... etc.

If the above is not currently used in your organization, consider that it will trigger in a change request too. So this week you got 601 changes.

I hope this helps

2014-02-24 by "fsayirayi"

I have a question on change management that it should identify the process flow and documentation and to design a service design package. Please can l have a guideline or hint on what is needed.

Reply on 2014-07-07

Change Management are responsible for producing policy, process and procedure documentation. ITIL provides a high level process that can support your organisation. You may need to adapt or align your organization and suppliers to reap the benefits of Change Management.

2014-12-05 by "Danny.Claude"

Could you please specific?

Are these the 8 items that the Change Advisory Board must check?

Reply on 2015-01-05

Many thanks for contacting ITILnews.

The Change Advisory Board's (CAB) purpose is to support the authorization of changes and to assist Change Management in the assessment and prioritization of changes. CAB members are chosen to adequately assess changes from a business and technical perspective. It is important to ensure that the CAB is used for the 'significant' or 'major' changes, bringing all 'minor' changes to the CAB will dilute the effectiveness and value of the CAB and consideration should made to delegate the review and authorization activities for 'minor' changes to the Change Manager.

The CAB meeting agenda may include the following:

- Failed, backed-out, unauthorized changes.

- Requests for Change (RFCs) to be assessed by the CAB

- RFCs that have been assessed by CAB members

- Scheduling of changes / update of Change Schedule

- Change Management process amendments and proposals (RFC)

- Change Management successes and accomplishments

- Outstanding changes and those in progess

- Advance notice of RFCs expected for review at next CAB

I hope the above provides some clarity around the role of the CAB. It should be stressed that the role of the Change Manager is fully understood and defined together with that of the CAB. Change Management must be an 'enabler' for the organization and not become bureaucratic and a 'bottleneck' and ultimately ineffective.

2017-02-22 by "gigo4915"

Been in the ITSM start-up & transformation business over 15+ years. Huumm media ay? Trying to sell more newspapers / driving up ratings? Did they publish equally all the success stories with ITIL Change Mgmt? Let's not cast any stones ... To those naysayers .. do you have any alternative superior solutions? I am open to learn.. No? Then run along..

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