What is Effective Change Management? A Guide to reduce Downtimes

The concern from an organization stating, "We frequently experience problems in our information systems. How can we address these issue?" points to a critical challenge faced by many businesses. Specifically, the fact that critical systems malfunction in a way that hinders work and that resolving these problems takes a long time is an indicator of a fundamental management deficiency.

In such situations, the first and strongest suspicion usually concerns changes made to the systems.

1. 🛑 The Root of the Problem: Weak Change Management

The most common reason behind system outages and lengthy resolutions is the inadequate management of changes (development, upgrades, configuration changes, etc.) made to information systems.

·         Failure to Identify Risks: Inability to foresee potential side effects and risks associated with the change.

·         Poor Timing: Implementing the change during peak workload hours or when everyone is actively working.

·         Lack of Control: Insufficient or non-existent Post-Implementation Reviews following the change.

In this scenario, the problem is only realized after it occurs, and because necessary groundwork was not done beforehand, finding the source of the problem takes a long time.

2. ✅ The Solution: The Change Management Process

The key to permanently resolving frequent outages is to introduce a structured process discipline. This discipline should be established by leveraging international standards and frameworks designed for information systems.

🎯 Guiding Frameworks and Standards

Standards like ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 27001 offer comprehensive guidance for managing information systems. However, instead of trying to implement the entirety of these documents, you should focus primarily on the most urgent need: the Change Management Process.

🛠️ Organization-Specific Process Design

Every organization's business processes, goals, and infrastructure are unique. Therefore, while best practices from standards should be examined, an organization-specific Change Management process must subsequently be designed.

·         Design Steps:

1.      Change Request Process: Defining who requests a change, how, and with what required information.

2.      Risk Analysis and Impact Assessment: Determining the potential risk and impact of every change on the systems.

3.      Authorization Mechanism (CAB): Defining the necessary authority levels (e.g., Change Advisory Board) for change approval.

4.      Implementation Window: Determining the most suitable, low-risk time slot for the change deployment.

5.      Rollback Plan: Creating a detailed plan to quickly revert to the previous stable state if a problem arises.

6.      Post-Implementation Review: Conducting tests to confirm the change is working as expected.

🙋 Defining the Process Owner Role

For this designed process to function, a Process Owner must be assigned.

·         Training and Communication: The designed process must be thoroughly explained to all employees involved (the expert wishing to implement a new development, their manager, and the organizational process manager).

·         Role Definition: The Process Owner role is responsible for the operation, development, and standard compliance of this process. This individual can take on this responsibility in addition to their existing role (e.g., an IT Manager); this depends entirely on the job content.

3. ❌ Wrong Approaches to Avoid

There are reactive, costly, and often destructive steps taken in response to frequent problems that ultimately fail. The following actions should absolutely be avoided:

·         Changing or Upgrading the Information Systems: The problem might not be the system itself, but the way you manage it. Migrating to a new system without proper Change Management will only transfer old problems to the new environment.

·         Changing the Team Responsible for System Maintenance: If the issue stems from undefined or poorly designed processes rather than personal inadequacy, you risk losing talented team members.

·         Changing the Incident Management Process: Incident Management focuses on quickly resolving an outage that has already occurred. Change Management focuses on preventing the incident from happening. Modifying only the resolution mechanism without establishing a prevention mechanism will allow the problem to persist.

·         Changing the People Who Handle the Cases: This is the easiest way to lose your team and will not solve the core problem.

These wrong approaches will only lead to a waste of money or the loss of your team; they do not solve the actual problem. The permanent solution is to design and implement a disciplined Change Management process.

The first step to preventing system outages is to implement a disciplined Change Management process that is specifically designed for your organization, well-trained, and rigorously followed.