Journey to Implementation Change Management Process (Part 1)

Background

Have business activity of your enterprise suddenly disturbed caused by IT problem? And the internal didn't know what causing it. Everyone become busy to check their own job and sometimes pointing fingers to others is the best solutions to save their own seat. That's the reality. To find the root cause of the problem is one thing, but to recover the system from disturbance is the mandatory. Usually when the system already recover, finding the root cause might be forgotten by the internal because they return to their daily activities. Or might be the root cause become another long list mystery to be unsolved. Why it can be happen? because there's no change management properly applied in the enterprise. They can't track every changes that might affect to the enterprise.


Changes are Important

Every parameters in the system have a big role to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of the system. No matter what type of the parameters. The awareness of changes should be informed as early as possible to internal enterprise. They should aware the changes might become critical to business continuity.
The major problem as an IT is documentations. Rarely as a techie consider documenting the activities as a essential activity to be completed and to be use as part of evaluation in the future. Usually the documentation stay on their own mind. Or sometimes it scattered in many files and rarely updated based on existing / future state. A big effort changes should be need to changes this bad habit.

References

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) can be used as reference to knowing advantages of changes management. Also, another good references is COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology). Both of them provide easiness guideline to be followed. The enterprise can combine both of them to build comprehensive change management.
Change Management in ITIL define as a part of process in Service Transition. But before we discuss the change management process, lets we take a look what is Service Transition.
Service Transition simply define as the process that escort services from development phase to production phase. It stand between development and production. It also serves as a gatekeeper to every pre-implementation services. Here are the set of process in Service Transition:

1. Transition Planning and Support
2. Change Management
3. Service Asset and Configuration Management
4. Release and Deployment Management
5. Service Validation and Testing
6. Change Evaluation
7. Knowledge Management

COBIT define changes management in BAI (Build, Acquire and Implement) domain, especially refer to process BAI06 (Manage Changes). It consist 4 management practices:

1. BAI06.01: Evaluate, prioritise and authorise change requests.
2. BAI06.02: Manage emergency changes.
3. BAI06.03: Track and report change status.
4. BAI06.04: Close and document the changes.

For more detail explanation, please refer to this link: ITIL and COBIT.

See you on the next article.
Thank you for reading.

- EJ