IT Change Management

What is change management software?

Change management software can be used to facilitate any kind of change within an organization. These platforms help streamline change management processes and minimize their impact on employees’ daily routines.

What are common types of change management?

Change management systems can be used to address a variety of change types, including the following:

• Standard changes: A standard change is any regularly occurring change for a specific service or for the IT infrastructure. IT technicians typically adhere to a specific set of procedures during the rollout of a standard change, so little risk is involved. Installing a new printer or deploying a new Word processing software are common examples of a standard change. 
• Normal changes: Despite their name, normal changes are anything but normal. These changes must undergo a change management review process and receive a sign-off from members of the Change Advisory Board—a group of employees dedicated to authorizing and scheduling complex changes. Though normal changes aren’t as urgent as emergency changes, they still tend to be higher risk.
• Major changes: Major changes require financial investment and/or involve a high level of risk. Due to the high stakes, a major change is often accompanied by a robust change proposal. These proposals detail why the change is necessary, how it will benefit the company, and what steps will be taken to mitigate preidentified risks. 
• Emergency changes: An emergency change, also known as an urgent change, is any change a company must launch ASAP. These changes tend to have a greater impact on employees and should be avoided whenever possible. Most companies have clear definitions of what constitutes an emergency change. One common example of an emergency change is the installation of a critical patch following a security breach.  

What are the differences between incident, problem, and change management?

When researching change management, it’s important to address the differences between “changes,” “incidents,” and “problems.”

Here’s a brief overview of each one:

• Changes: In IT management, changes are activities within an organization’s IT infrastructure, particularly those designed to enhance the infrastructure. These can include changes to hardware, software, documentation, procedures, resources, or some other aspect of your system. 
• Incidents: An incident is a singular event tied to a specific device, application, system, or service within your organization. For example, an employee may submit an incident ticket pertaining to a laptop continuously shutting down unprompted or a tablet not holding a charge. 
• Problems: A problem is a collective group of incidents. If 15 employees report their new tablets are failing to hold a charge, you have a problem on your hands. A problem typically requires a change. In this case, the change would consist of replacing the faulty tablets. 

What is the difference between ITIL and Agile change management?

Though there are several types of change management within the industry today, ITIL change management and Agile change management are two of the most common.

ITIL change management: Within ITIL, change management falls under the service transition phase with change evaluation, project management, and release and deployment management. ITIL management is designed to ensure changes are implemented efficiently and effectively to minimize their impact on the functioning of the organization. ITIL change management can be broken down into smaller subprocesses.

Many of these subprocesses are rolled into the overall ITIL management process, which includes the following:

• Change management support
• Assessment of change proposals
• RFC logging and review
• Assessment and implementation of emergency changes
• Change assessment by the change manager
• Change assessment by the Change Advisory Board
• Change scheduling and build authorization
• Change deployment authorization
• Minor change deployment
• Post-implementation review and change closure

Agile change management: Unlike ITIL change management’s rigid structure, Agile change management is more fluid. Instead of consolidating the change management steps under a single umbrella held by one central team, it divides change management activities among various project owners. “Speed” in Agile change management is measured by how quickly employees can get up and running versus the rate at which the change is implemented. While IT change management software is often built with ITIL in mind, these platforms offer several services (including workflow automation) also capable of facilitating Agile change management.

What is the change management process in ITIL?

No two change management processes are exactly the same. In fact, businesses are encouraged to customize their change management processes to ensure they fit their goals and objectives. The most important thing is having a process in place—one management has signed off on—to ensure each change implementation follows a standard set of procedures. 

So, what are the essential elements of change management? Most ITIL change management processes follow some variation of these five steps:

1. Identify the change: Employees submit requests to the IT help desk every day. Some of these requests are for simple incidents pertaining to forgotten passwords, files not downloading, or faulty web browsers, but others are more complicated. Large problems and significant change requests can shake up the entire IT environment. Common change initiatives include the release of a new company-wide technology or the implementation of a new security best practice. 
2. Evaluate the impact: It’s important for IT administrators to review potential changes to identify the number of employees they will impact and what the impact will be. The level of change evaluation conducted varies greatly depending on the type of change in question. Larger changes often require a more formal change evaluation, one in which an official Change Evaluation Report is produced. During these evaluations, new changes are examined to determine their potential impacts on the business’s bottom line, IT infrastructure, scheduled upcoming changes, and operational aspects of IT and non-IT services. 
3. Approve or deny the change: Whether a change is approved is based on its operational and economic impact. Changes designed to boost productivity, increase operational efficiencies, streamline processes, and contribute to the overall success of the organization are typically approved. However, a request for a significant change typically requires authorization before it can be made. The individuals providing this authorization vary depending on the organization and whether the change is strategic, tactical, or operational in nature. Smaller changes rarely have to go through a rigorous approval process, especially since more minute change requests don’t run the risk of financial repercussions. 
4. Implement the change: The level of detail within the implementation process is generally determined by the size of the company and the scope of the change. Large-scale organizations commonly rely on dedicated change management employees to facilitate any changes. Smaller companies, on the other hand, turn to their day-to-day IT departments to test changes, ensuring they run without a hitch, before launching a full-scale deployment. Change schedules are commonly used in organizations of all sizes to keep employees at every level, from the C-suite on down, aware of impending changes and how they’ll be affected. 
5. Review and report on the change: It’s important for IT administrators to conduct a thorough evaluation of changes after they’ve been implemented. These detailed reviews are designed to reveal potential user concerns and whether the change was launched successfully. Changes that fail to live up to the IT administrator’s standards must be addressed through a remediation plan. Typically, these plans are produced well in advance to minimize the impact of a faulty change on end users. But while having a remediation plan in place is important, conducting a comprehensive impact analysis prior to the change launch is the best way to safeguard against potential errors. 

How can change management tools improve service desks?

A service desk with change management tools can benefit from a more consolidated change execution by aligning its ITIL processes with applicable problems and releases as well as its CMDB. When a change occurs, you’ll have all the information you need to understand who will be impacted and for how long. Since the details of the change are stored within one platform, you can use these tools to track the progress of a release. Tracking is also crucial because it allows IT administrators to pinpoint where errors occur. Knowing where a change went wrong helps ensure the same error won’t happen in a future rollout.

Many help and service desk tools are designed to streamline the way you provide support and deliver services to your organization. They can consolidate, manage, and prioritize tickets coming in via phone, email, and other channels so all ticket details and resolutions are stored within one easy-to-access hub. Automation rules can also help streamline ticket routing, allowing you to build rules to quickly and efficiently get tickets into the right hands. This removes ticket routing bottlenecks, so you can manage tickets and requests as soon as possible. 

These services go hand in hand with the change management process. As a result, service desk solutions should also serve as change management tools. Combining these platforms can help you follow ITIL best practices by offering built-in ticket escalation. This means any incident ticket can be bumped up to a problem ticket or associated with an upcoming change or release, which can help you more easily identify and address redundancies. 

How does change management work in Service Desk?

SolarWinds^® Service Desk is designed to support IT change management with its change and release management modules. These modules can be configured to support every step of your company’s service management process, helping you ensure every change is implemented as smoothly as possible. 

Through the platform’s CMDB, you can gain in-depth visibility into the technology infrastructure of your entire organization. Additionally, the platform makes it easier to identify the connections between users, assets, and any other configuration items and better understand how each employee will be impacted by scheduled changes. With this information, you can alert employees well in advance to ensure they have as much time as possible to prepare. The more you communicate with your employees, the smoother the change management process will be for all parties involved. 

SolarWinds Service Desk can also help facilitate the change management process through its robust change history. Retaining historical data allows users to track and store changes, root causes of problems, and the actions taken during the implementation process. Building on your historical data can help save your team the effort and time involved in trying to remember what worked and what didn’t, allowing them to focus on continuously improving and evolving. 

But this isn’t the only way Service Desk can help drive greater efficiency within the IT change management process. Its intelligence software can also help you identify changes with similar traits, and it combines these factors into a single release to streamline deployments and reduce the need for multiple outages. 

SolarWinds Service Desk is designed to make the end-user experience—a pivotal consideration within any IT change management process—a top priority. The Employee Service Portal in Service Desk can serve as a communication hub for IT technicians and employees across departments. On the IT side, technicians can use the portal to send employees detailed alerts regarding potential disruptions and even provide status updates throughout the entire change management process. This helps ensure employees are kept aware of need-to-know information. From an employee perspective, the portal can be leveraged to more easily submit incident, problem, and change requests. If an urgent problem requires immediate attention, the portal can provide a 24/7 direct line of communication to service providers and a knowledge base where they can access resources to resolve known issues.