Change Management
Change management—also known as change enablement—is an IT practice designed to minimize disruptions to IT services while making changes to critical systems and services.
A change is adding, modifying, or removing anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.
Change management practices are designed to reduce incidents and meet regulatory standards. The practices ensure efficient and prompt handling of changes to IT infrastructure and code. Whether you’re rolling out new services, managing existing ones, or resolving problems in code, modern change management approaches break down silos, provide context and transparency, avoid bottlenecks, and minimize risk.
Change management helps accomplish change in the following ways:
- Establishing a framework to manage the change process
- Prioritizing necessary changes to properly allocate resources
- Incorporating relevant information for smarter decision making
- Involving necessary stakeholders from dev and IT for approvals
- Incorporating testing of changes, to avoid incidents
- Streamlining and improving the flow of changes to deliver value more quickly
The Change Management Process
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Change request - Someone requests a change and includes notes on possible risks, expected implementation, and affected systems.
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Change request review - A change manager or peer reviewer reviews the initial change request
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Build Change - The team creates a game plan for the change. They document expected outcomes, resources, timeline, testing requirements, and ways to roll back the change if needed.
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Change approval -The appropriate change manager, peer reviewer reviews the plan and approves the change.
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Change implementation -The team ships the change, documenting procedures and results along the way.
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Change closure - When appropriate, the change manager reviews and closes the change when appropriate. Their report should communicate whether the change was successful, timely, accurately estimated, within budget, etc.