Posted by: Michael Disabato
The Change Management process is one of the most important processes that will be developed. Change Management ensures the stability and security of the infrastructure. Unauthorized or rushed changes account for a significant source of service interruptions and can open a company to potential security breaches.
The best way to determine the quality of the Change Management process is to examine five indicators:
- The number of unauthorized changes
- The number of unplanned outages
- The change success rate
- The number of emergency changes
- The number of delayed project implementations
Any number of unauthorized changes above zero indicates your process has failed. Find out who is bypassing the process and discipline them.
If the unplanned outages can be traced back to the changes being made (and some, if not most of them will), the process needs rework in the risk management and QA phases.
A high change success rate means you can cautiously celebrate. A low change success rate means you need to post-mortem each change and see where they went awry.
Emergency changes generally are caused by incorrectly applied changes. This indicates the testing process is flawed and needs to be reexamined.
Delaying projects is never a good thing. If delays can be tracked back to the change process, find out what the cause is and fix it.
Change management is not hard, but it is critical to the success of the IT department.
Michael
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