Inforonics Blog

Innovation occurs with precision and understanding. Protection of critical business processes can be secured by reducing the risks and exposures to changes of the technology that automate and manage these business processes.  Using composite technologies like a Configuration Management System (CMS) allow disparate teams to utilize a common tools space to visualize and analyze impacts to business services from the assets undergoing change.  Thus hands-on resources can make better business decisions and provide better guidance to management of risk by correlating request for changes (RFCs) to configuration items (CIs).  This brings manay benefits to the operations, here are just a few:

• Guarding against unapproved changes that may open unintended security holes.
• Improvement of service and business continuity by identifying single points of failure. 
• Improved monitoring by seeing the dependencies which can enable engineers to quickly identify a new incident that occurs and know instantly why or how it happened.  
• Ensure vital business functions were properly tested to protect the operation of the business.
• Provide visibility into each request for a changes affect on CI’s & ensure new CI’s are provisioned with the appropriate levels of managemt (i.e. Monitoring, Documentation, Anti-Virus, etc…) 

Putting Change Management in place and getting an organization to readily adopt a consistent and measurable process is difficult.  It takes executive sponsorship and the right level of training and tools to make it work.  Below are some guidlines we fee will help a Change Management implementation strategy bring success:

1)  Create, Document, and Communicate Policy

The first step in implementing Change Management is changing your people.  Individuals need to learn the reward or penalty for making changes outside of the approved procedures.  Start with solid Change and Release policies backed by an enterprise architecture standard that is supported by strong configuration management.  Unless you build traceablility into your systems, you will never be able to govern this process.  Thus stating a violation in your policy without the ability to govern it will be seen as nothing more than an idle threat.  Undocumented and unapproved changes to your environment are a risk to your business and potential the jobs of your employees.  Treat it this way!

2)  Create Process Integration Points

You must define and determine the inputs into the RFC process.  Leaving change management out as a silo’d process is setting up the team and charter for failure.  ITIL preaches the 7 R’s of change, which are good to know, but it’s more than asking questions. Change Management is a governer, not a designers, creator or supporter.  Thus if your process does not have the necessary give and take influences and touchpoints to these other outcome aspects, it will fail.  The “must-haves” touchpoints must include:

• Incident or problem fixes
• New feature functions
• Architectural improvements for availability capacity or security
• Continuous Service Improvement
• Finding or Business Alignment adjustment

3)  Create effective change categories and build approval procedures accordingly. 

All to often I have seen change advisory boards of 20 or more employees spending an entire afternoon reviewing hundreds of alterations.  Seriously, this is a waste of valuable time!  Knock it off, there is real work to do.  Remember the benefit is accelerated “managed changes” not useless beauracracy that holds meetings as a facade of risk protection.  A group of select people who are responsible, informed, and empowered are more than capable of approving changes if they have been categorized correctly and approved functionally.  Keep your CABs (Change Advisory Boards) small and focused. Your RFCs (Request for Changes) will have better analysis against them, more evaluation of impact and given better attention.

 Before the next major issue arises, seize the opportunity to make a change.  Put controls in place that build visibility into your organizational efforts and you will see that projects and tasks do not have to turn into chaos even at today’s fast and furious business pace. Dramatically increase the efficiency of change requests in your organization by utilizing tools and processes that streamline and track your efforts.  Focus resources on innovation – not fighting fires.’ ‘The Real Value of Change Management’

Now the big question:  How do you manage changes with Cloud Computing?

We’ll tackle that in our next posting.