ITIL Change Management: A Complete Guide - ManageEngine (2023)

ITILdescribes change management as the process of monitoring and managing a change throughout its lifecycle, from start to finish, with the goal of minimizing risk.

Establishing a consistent change management process will help your organization to smoothly implement changes with a high success rate.

What is a change?

According to ITIL, a change is "the addition, modification or deletion of anything that may have a direct or indirect impact on the Services".

In the simplest case, any change to an organization's IT infrastructure that may affect the organization's operations is called an IT change. This includes replacing printers, projectors, servers and more.

What is the difference between an incident, a problem and a change?

Now that we know what change management is, let's look at why organizations need it, starting with change management objectives.

ITIL Change Management Objectives

Empower organizations to take control and manage their change:

Change management gives you better control over the change process and helps you implement changes with minimal risk. By following standard processes, change management ensures that all aspects of each change, such as planning, risk assessment and implementation tracking, are managed effectively. use of aservice desk toolEnd-to-end change tracking can work wonders and allow an organization to better manage its IT infrastructure with well planned and executed changes.

Help organizations better embrace change:

By tracking the entire change process, change management allows organizations to keep track of all change requests. It also makes it easier to detect and contain the number of unauthorized changes. By allowing users to submit a request for change (RFC) only through the call center tool, organizations can gather all the necessary information about the change early on and decide whether the change should be implemented. A robust approval mechanism ensures that changes receive all necessary approvals before being implemented.

Enable continuous improvement:

Change management isn't just for bad times; Its purpose is to help organizations continuously improve and keep pace with their infrastructure and processes.ramaentrendenciasmaking sure they can seamlessly implement the necessary changes without interrupting ongoing service operations.

A data organization:

• Fewer change collisions thanks to effective change management.
• The ability to upgrade without affecting operations.
• Fewer failed changes.
• Accurate classification of changes.

And end users:

• Better communication about service downtime and unavailability due to planned changes.
• Smoother service operations with fewer interruptions due to poorly planned changes.

Let's take a look nowhow to implement change managementin your organization. First, you need to establish an effective change process that allows you to plan the changes, get the necessary approval, and implement them. Here is a change management process you can follow to effectively manage change.

The change management process

Step 1: Shipping

The first stage is the beginning of change. This includes gathering basic information about the change ticket, such as the change type and priority.

• creation: Change tickets are initiated by the call center tool. The necessary information is collected from the beginning using an amendment form with mandatory fields.
• Define shift functions– By using change roles, organizations can delegate change responsibilities to different stakeholders and control the level of access each role has to each phase of a change.

Step 2: Planning

The next phase is to plan the entire move. A well-planned change is the key to successful change implementation. It is also important to obtain the necessary approvals to implement the change. Details such as impact, implementation plans, rollback plans and associated downtime are documented to clearly communicate the change plan to stakeholders and convince them that the change is worthwhile.

Step 3: Approval

The change plan must then be approved by theAdvisory Board on Changes (CAB),Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB) and any other authorities involved in the change or organizational infrastructure affected by the change. Creating custom CABs helps organizations bring together relevant employees to easily manage approvals. Automating the approval process speeds up the entire change and ensures that no approval requests are lost.

Note: The CAB is a combination of different roles and work teams. Depending on the severity and scope of the change, it could include C-level executives, team managers, technical teams, finance people, and more.

Step 4: Implementation

Once the necessary approvals are obtained, the change can be implemented. Organizations can track and manage the implementation of changes by creating tasks or using a project.

• Delegating work through tasks: Tasks are created and assigned to different technicians from different teams to easily manage the work of everyone involved in implementing the change. Parent and child tasks can be used to configure task dependencies and ensure that tasks are executed in a specific order and that no tasks are missed.
• use project management: Organizations can use projects to manage large-scale changes, such as B. Moving the organization's entire infrastructure to the cloud. Projects support a larger scope of deployment and can better handle a larger number of tasks, people, and milestones. Tight integration between change management andproject managementIt can be very beneficial for organizations.

Step 5: Verification

A post-implementation review is then performed to ensure that there are no implementation mismatches and that any issues are resolved before the change is finalized.

Step 6: Closing

This is the final step in the change management process. The completed exchange rate is recorded as successful, failed, or incomplete. Recording the correct completion code makes an organization's metrics much more accurate and useful.

Here is a list of resources to keep in mind whenChoosing a service desk tool.When these capabilities are in place, you can implement an effective change management process in your organization.

exchange management

Change creation and registration

• Create changes from incidents and issues and apply the necessary information.
• Gather the information you need with custom change templates.
• Create different types of changes and create unique workflows for each type.
• Engage the right stakeholders using change roles, for example B. Change Owners, Approvers, Administrators, and Change Reviewers.

Change planning and evaluation

• Create sophisticated change plans with impact analysis, implementation, rollback and downtime plans.
• Keep a checklist of key steps that need to be taken.

approval change

• Form multiple CABs.
• Configure multiple approval levels. Check if the RFC needs to be approved by all CAB members or by one member.
• Give the change manager final say on approving the change.
• Bypass Change Manager and Change Approver approvals, automatically approving the change when all CAB members recommend it.
• Mark end users as service request approvers.

Coordinate the implementation of changes.

• Break changes down into tasks and use work logs to estimate how long it will take the change implementation team to complete activities.
• Simplify deployment by creating projects from a change or by associating a change with existing projects.
• Keep track of all incidents and related issues that caused or were caused by the change.
• Plan for downtime and advertise to these key stakeholders.
• Keep those involved informedperiodic notifications.

Checking and closing changes

• Document the post-implementation review (PIR).

change workflows

• Create different workflows for different types of changes and processes with different levels of complexity and functionality.
• Configure various actions such as conditions, changes, notifications, field updates and approvals while transitioning between stages.
• To createchange workflowson a drag and drop canvas.