Why is change management in the IT environment such an important process?

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In today’s organizations, there are two critical requirements for the IT department. First, IT is expected to provide stable and reliable services to keep the organization running efficiently and meet end-user expectations. Second, the IT department needs to implement regular service updates so that the organization can adapt to ever-changing financial, business and security requirements.

Failure to meet any of these requirements can lead to unfortunate consequences. Failure to provide reliable service delivery can severely reduce a company’s productivity and lead to losses. In many companies, downtime costs more than $300,000 per hour (according to Gartner statistics). When it comes to web services, that figure can be much higher.

At the same time, organizations that don’t adapt to the conditions that await them in the future will no longer be able to keep up with the times and will become market outsiders. Deploying changes too slowly can cause employees to leave for other companies with less cumbersome systems, and customers to turn to organizations that bring them more value for their services.

So how do you achieve compliance with these conflicting requirements? Change management allows an organization to release updates, ensuring stability and reducing risk. Change management helps accomplish the following tasks:

Shaping the environment to manage the implementation of change
Prioritizing the necessary changes to properly allocate resources
Incorporating the right information for intelligent decision-making
Involving the right stakeholders from development and IT departments for approval
Including change testing to prevent incidents
Simplifying and optimizing the change flow to accelerate customer revenue

Types of changes

Standard changes
Standard changes are low-risk, typically repeatable and pre-validated. They are often made according to a documented and validated process.

For example, adding memory or storage is a standard change. Replacing a faulty router with an identical working router is also a standard change. Creating a new database instance is also a standard change.

All of these changes are routine and follow a well-defined process. Since this change process has already gone through the risk assessment and validation stage of change management, there is no need to go through this process again every time a router needs to be replaced.

For many companies, standard changes are the first thing that can be automated. Some companies report that 70% of standard changes can be automated to allow teams to focus on normal and emergency changes.

Normal changes
Normal changes are non-emergency changes that don’t have a defined, pre-validated process.

For example, updating the content management system is a normal change. Moving to a new data center is also a normal change. Performance improvements are also considered a normal change. Such changes are not standard and repeatable. There are risks associated with these changes. But at the same time, they are not emergency changes. This means that they can be put in the normal change management queue for risk assessment and confirmation.

Some normal changes, such as moving data to a different data center, are high risk and may require risk assessment and confirmation by a change advisory board (CAB). Other changes, such as a website change, are low risk. They can be confirmed at shorter notice by a designated change authority or through automated checks and peer review.

Emergency changes.
These changes occur because of an unforeseen error or threat. They need to be responded to immediately in order to restore service to customers or employees or to protect systems from the threat.

For example, implementing a security patch is an emergency change. Restoring access to a server is also an emergency change. Dealing with a major incident is also an emergency change.

Emergency changes must be handled in a much shorter time frame because the risks of a lengthy review process are higher than those associated with a quick fix.