The Purpose of Change Management

Digitalization requires organizations be more responsive to changes. But despite the speed they are also required to be resilient over service outages, system failures and breaches. You will not get a badge when you implement a change fast and afterwards facing service outages. No one will discuss with you how complex your IT environment is, how much pressure you had, inter-departmental coordination weaknesses, your staffing shortages etc. At the end you should manage the IT Changes not vice versa.

Majority of service outages is caused by service changes!

In some of our projects, we found out that up to 50 percent of service outages is caused by service changes. This is really a high ratio. There is still room for improvement in many organizations.

First of all, do you measure the root cause of service outages?  Problem management will help you to analyse the root causes of major incidents.  If there are signs of poor change management, you should focus on improvement areas and continuously measure the impact of the implemented improvement actions. 

Accordingly, we have developed a change management audit checklist to help you to identify improvement areas in IT Change Management.

The Audit Checklist can also be used as self-assessment and it focuses on 4 domains as ITIL 4 also recommends:

• Organization and People
• Information and Technology
• Value Streams and Processes
• Partners and Suppliers

We all know that nice and fancy tools, good and long process documentation are not enough for an effective change management process.

Here you will also find a change form and change management process flow that may inspire your approach to improve your process.

If you have any questions related to this self-assessment questionnaire, we will be happy to answer these within 48 hours.