Change Management Do's and Dont's!!

Miscellaneous Change Management Do's and Don'ts.

Here are some tips for change management.

Items to do:

Do post-implementation reviews to determine whether the change succeeded or not.

Do track the change success rate.

Do use the change success rate to learn and avoid making historically risky changes.

Do make sure everyone attends the meetings, otherwise auditors have a good case that this is a nonfunctioning control.

Do categorize the disposition of all changes.

In other words, all outcomes must be documented once a change is approved. Three potential outcomes are: -

Change withdraw - the change requester rescinds the change request along with the reason why. This should not be flagged as a failed change in change metrics.

Abort - the change failed, accompanied by documentation of what went wrong.

Completed successfully - the change was implemented and is functioning appropriately.


Items not to do:

Do not authorize changes without rollback plans that everybody reviews. Changes do fail, so be proactive and think ahead about how to recover from a problem rather than attempting to do so during the heat of firefighting.

Do not allow rubber stamping approval of changes.

Do not let any system changes off the hook - someone made it, so understand what caused it.

Do not send mixed messages. Bear in mind that the first time the process is circumvented, incredible damage can be done to the process. "Well heck, we did it last time" or the boss said, "just do it" - both send the wrong messages.

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This is an extract from - "The Visible Ops Handbook, Starting ITIL in 4 Practical Steps", by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford. Copyright 2004 by the IT Process Institute (ITPI). To learn more about Visible Ops, use the Google Search Facility on Dr. ITIL using the Keywords, "Visible Ops".