Why do We Need Change Management?

1
Real World Example 1
Scenario 1 – Before Change Management 1
Scenario 2 – After Change Management 2
Benefit of Managed Change 2
There is no One-Size-Fits-All Change Management Solution 2
What Kind of Change Needs to be Managed 3
Processing Change Requests 3
Change Management Should Work Your Way 4
Software Flexibility is Essential 5
The EnterpriseWizard Solution 5
Figure 1 – Unlimited number of approvals for each change 6
Conclusion 7

Page 2 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 Change is an inevitable part of every IT department’s mission. In order to provide effec-
tive services, IT personnel must be constantly aware of what needs upgrading, replacing
and removing. Knowing which changes need to be made and having well-defined pro-
cedures for implementing change are crucial. Yet in many organizations, changes are
made in a haphazard and uncontrolled way, particularly when there’s a fire to put out.
Change management provides a rational methodology for implementing and controlling
change. A well designed change management system will:
Bring change under better control by enforcing an appropriate approval process
Improve change efficiency by improving planning prior to the change
Improve communication about upcoming changes
Reduce unexpected and negative consequences of changes
Provide insight into the time being spent on different types of change through
reporting and analytics
Create a full audit trail of changes to key business systems, satisfying government
compliance regulations or internal auditors (See our white paper: Reducing the
Costs of Government Compliance with BPA for more on this subject).

Generally the means of achieving these goals involve improving communications about
upcoming changes through automatic email notifications, making change scheduling more
transparent, and ensuring that proper approvals are obtained and recorded before
making system-wide or significant changes.

How does this work in real life? Let’s look at an example of a typical scenario with and
without change control.

A company has a server running a web-based application used by all staff members to
enter their time. After a security audit, the CIO is told that access to this server needs to
be restricted to SSL and all other ports closed. He instructs an IT employee to make this
change, not realizing that the shortcuts the IT department has set up to access the appli-
cation on all employees’ desktops will be broken by this change. The IT employee makes
the change as instructed, without stopping to think about any impact this might have, and
employees are unable to enter their time because they do not know why their shortcuts
have stopped working. The change has to be backed out, users are disgruntled, and
time is wasted fixing the problem created by the change.

Page 1 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 A company has a server running a web-based application used by staff members to en-
ter their time. After a security audit, the CIO is told that access to this server needs to
be restricted to SSL and all other ports closed. He submits a change request to the sys-
tem, filling out required information about the reason for the change, and the entire
process is managed by the workflow shown below

Note: (A) symbols indicate automatic actions that occur at various steps, for example an
Email to Notify of Approval. (G) symbols indicate a “guard” that prevents unauthorized
actions. For example, only authorized people may be allowed to make specific requests.
Because the request is for a production server used by all employees, it is routed to IT
staff who enter information into the risk analysis fields and take responsibility for either
approving or rejecting it. The form contains a set of checklist items for SSL servers such as
“test SSL certificate” and “test user access”.
The IT staff member installs an SSL certificate and after installation checks his own desk-
top shortcut. He notes that the server must be configured to automatically redirect http
to https requests before the change can take effect. On completion of this configuration,
the change is marked as Implemented. If some of these necessary steps presented a
problem, the change could be rejected and the requestor notified. The tasks are com-
pleted in the proper order, employees are automatically notified by email when the
change request is completed or rejected and the entire process is auditable. Not only is
the process transparent, but the system maintains a History that proves how it was fol-
lowed in any particular case.

Because employees are asked to think about consequences and plan for them before
jumping in and executing the change, and because the right people are notified and
asked to approve the change, errors are avoided. There is also a documented process
that was followed and that can be reported on. Another benefit is that all the time it
took to analyze the situation, install the certificate, and configure the server to automati-
cally re-route http can be tracked in the system, allowing the total cost of making this
change to be quantified.

Page 2 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 The way change is handled depends to a large extent on the size of an organization, the
kinds of business objects subject to change, and the organizational structure, so no two
companies will implement change management in exactly the same way.
In fact, businesses are so diverse that it would be impossible to design a single change
management solution that would be effective, or even usable, by all. While a software
vendor can offer a reasonable change structure and some kind of approval process out
of the box, it will almost never exactly match a particular company’s needs.
So change management software will almost always need significant customization, and
it must be flexible and easy to customize, ideally without writing new code, to accommo-
date a large variety of structures and processes.
Because you can’t really buy a change management system off the shelf that will be ef-
fective at telling you what to do, you have the opportunity to decide exactly how you
want to manage change in your organization. The first step is deciding what changes
you want to manage.

Definitions of change can be as diverse as the methods of managing it. The Information
Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) defines change as “the process of moving from
one defined state to another.” While this definition is broad enough to cover a large
variety of situations, it is too broad to be helpful when applied to specific problems.
Companies must therefore make their own decisions about what kinds of activities consti-
tute the kind of changes that should be controlled in a change management system.
While most companies would probably agree that a change to an infrastructure asset,
like the corporate mail server, should definitely come under change control, other IT tasks
may be less clearcut. Take a common example: setting up network access and an email
account for a new employee. Some companies may consider new employee setup a
“change” requiring approvals, while others may consider it a standard service request.
Typically a change management system is implemented alongside a help desk or service
desk, so the business challenge is usually defining which kinds of tasks should be treated
as changes and which should be service requests. One reasonable way to distinguish
between the two is to define a change as something that requires one ore more approv-
als, while a service request can be handled immediately by IT staff members.
So if a supervisor submits a request for new employee setup for Joe Smith and no other
approvals are needed, that might be a service request, while if the same supervisor sub-
mits a request to make a change to a financial report in Peoplesoft, and this requires
approval of an accounting manager, that would probably be a change request.
Deciding which business activities are to be handled as changes is the first step in imple-
menting a change system. The main goal should be to bring the behaviors that are most

Page 3 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 risky, mission critical, out-of-control, or subject to audit under better control. Adding
processes or tasks that already work smoothly without any oversight may not be helpful
– it can make the processes more cumbersome by requiring approvals and documenta-
tion, without offering commensurate benefits. It is often a good idea to start with a small
set of processes that will be subject to change management, and then to add more proc-
esses later as people become familiar with the system and are comfortable using it.

Some aspects of change management are fairly constant from business to business. A
change will typically start its life as a change request submitted by a user, and the ap-
propriate decision-makers will be automatically notified of the request.
Decision-makers should then have a mechanism for either rapidly approving/rejecting
the change or adding comments. If the request is approved, the system should be able
to schedule, remind, and notify about the change.
Users of assets affected by the change can be automatically notified by e-mail. The
system can also automate other elements of the change. For instance, when the hour for
the change arrives, the system might trigger a browser popup reminder or an email to
the person assigned to implement the change, send an email to users who will be af-
fected, and update any affected assets to change their Status to In Maintenance.
Once the change is marked as completed, the system can put the Assets’ Status back to
its previous value and send another email to any affected users to inform them that the
change has been successfully implemented.
If the change system is being used to manage software application changes or enhance-
ments, changes may be linked to particular releases and automation could notify some-
one when all changes related to a release are completed.

Given a change management system with a robust rules engine to provide the kind of
automation described above, it is up to your organization to decide how exactly you
want your change process to work. This may depend on many factors. Changes related
to assets are often handled differently from changes related to user accounts or soft-
ware applications or to any of the other objects that you may want to be subject to
change control.
An effective procedure at one business may be totally ineffective in another. When
evaluating changes, businesses will often differ in:
Which groups of people can submit change requests
The information required in change request submissions
How many approvals are needed from whom for different types of change
Whether emergency changes are handled differently from planned changes, and
if so, how

Page 4 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 What happens if an approver rejects the change initially
The complete workflow process that a change should follow
Who is responsible for scheduling the implementation of approved changes
Who must be notified of approved changes
What steps need to be taken to ensure implementation goes smoothly
Whether employees should track time spent on a change
Whether changes relating to multiple assets should each have their own change
request, or should be managed in a parent-child change structure
Whether change requests should be able to be generated directly from a button
in the support or help desk system

Change management software must provide the flexibility necessary to align with the
company’s overall business goals. Further, to gain full value out of the system, it should
ideally be integrated with asset and help desk management, since there is generally a
close relationship between these functions.
If you already have an asset management system, it is wise to ensure that the change
management system includes API’s necessary for easy integration. If you don’t have an
existing asset management system, then a change system that also includes asset man-
agement provides a more complete solution in the long run.

While the basic building blocks of a change management system may be similar across
systems, these building blocks may be formed into very different workflows and data
structures. Instead of hoping that a given software vendor’s version of change manage-
ment will duplicate your process and structure exactly -- an unlikely scenario – it is best
to select a software product that can implement your process the way you want it.
A flexible product should allow data structures, such as tables, fields, and relationships
between them, to be created and modified without coding. It should also have robust
workflow and rules functionality, so that you can easily build the workflow you want, ide-
ally using a graphical interface that will both document and implement the process you
want.
In summary, an effective change management system should have at least the following
features to provide a powerful, tailor-made solution:
Graphical workflow editor that can easily define your unique processes
Automated mechanisms for indicating approval or rejection of a change
Email integration with dynamic hotlinks for automated notification and easy ap-
proval at each step
Automated alerts if users have taken too long to approve/reject a change pro-
posal

Page 5 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 Ability to reassign change approvals when they are not responded to
Integration with the other systems that changes will affect
High-level management reports tracking how all changes have been handled
Ability to require approvals from individuals or team members
Intuitive interface for users

For organizations that are subject to audits, the system should also be able to:

Show auditors exactly what the change process is, without code inspections
Demonstrate that the process was followed in any particular case, with full infor-
mation provided on who approved any given part of the change and when they
approved it.

At EnterpriseWizard, we have been implementing change management and help desk

systems for over a decade, for both small and large organizations. EnterpriseWizard’s
adaptive platform makes it possible to design and implement a custom solution precisely
to your needs without coding, quickly and at an affordable cost. It has all of the fea-
tures described above and is designed out of the box to be able to not only manage
change, but also integrate with assets and help desk as part of a consolidated service
desk system.
The expertise of our staff can save both time and money, as we have already built a
wide variety of systems. To give just one example, there is a particularly high variation
in approval processes among different organizations. In general, large companies tend
to have more stages of approval and approvers than small companies.
At one large company we worked with, a change request could be assigned to any num-
ber of up to 80 different global teams for approval, and if any one team rejected the
request, it had to start all over. Figure 1 shows a screenshot from this system, where all
required approvals are shown in an embedded table within the change request so their
progress can be seen there. In this case, the system automatically counts how many ap-
provals are needed and how many have been received, and as soon as the two numbers
match, it automatically changes the status of the request to Approved and sends an email
to the assigned team.
The process is made easy for approvers, who receive an email from the system with all
the details of the change and a hyperlink that they can simply click to update the ap-
proval record with their approval.

Page 6 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 At the next company we worked with, all requests had to be approved by either two or
three individuals, depending on the type of change and its urgency. These two very dif-
ferent requirements called for completely distinct structures and workflows, both of which
were easily handled by EnterpriseWizard without coding.

Page 7 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.

 Implementing a change management system can have many benefits, particularly in
terms of improving efficiency and reducing outages and downtime. It also provides a
useful audit trail that can save huge amounts of time in meeting government compliance
requirements.
To gain the full benefits of change management requires software that is easy to config-
ure, integrates with other systems and provides a high level of automation without bur-
dening users with a steep learning curve. It also requires internal commitment in terms of
thinking about the processes that should be subject to change control and how they
should work in your organization.
With the unbeatable combination of an adaptive and powerful product and a well
thought-out process design, the benefits can be huge and well worth the commitment.

EnterpriseWizard, Inc. (www.enterprisewizard.com) Tel: 888.727.2209 is the leading

provider of powerful, easy-to-deploy, and cost-effective Web-based software solutions
for business process automation, customer support, ITIL, and CRM for organizations with
complex products or services. Its adaptable platform has attracted hundreds of
customers, ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies such as Chevron, NEC and
Emerson Electric.

Page 8 The Benefits of Change Management © EnterpriseWizard, Inc.