Change Management Overview

Overview

 

IT Systems and business processes are becoming more complex, and more inter-connected than ever before.  This is why it is important to manage the changes to such systems.  Maintain optimum up-time and service availability to your clients by ensuring that any changes to any systems, services or infrastructure is handled in a controlled and calculated fashion.

Change Management is the discipline that allows you to plan, track, approve, schedule, implement and review your changes in the best possible way in order to provide the best outcome for the business and all concerned.

Every organization implements change management differently in order to suit their particular needs, however, there are a few general concepts that are widespread.

Benefits of Change Management

 

Benefits of effective change management include:

Types of change

Standard change

A standard change is a well known, well defined change with known low-risk which is often pre-approved - that is, it doesn't require a formal approval process in order to be implemented.

Normal change

A change that arises out of necessity - often from the detection of a problem, or point of failure in a system.  May require approval to implement.

Emergency change

A change that arises when an unexpected matter arises that requires urgent documentation, approval and implementation.  Examples include a sudden breakdown in vital infrastructure, a security threat, virus outbreak, or similar time-critical event that needs to be rectified quickly, or unexpectedly.

 

 See also

Change Request Life-cycle

Change Management Models and Best Practice

Change Request Templates

Creating a new change request

Approval Process

 

Related concepts

Workflow Approvals (Different from Change Request Approval)