What is Change Management?
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• For unmanaged, unmonitored and uncontrolled changes, the success rate is less than 70%?
• 80% of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues including poor change management practices?
• Changes that fail create potential downtime, unplanned emergency work, changes in plans, and are a business risk?
• Unplanned work is an indicator of effectiveness of IT management processes and controls?
• Average organizations spend 45-55% of their time on unplanned activities?
• High performing IT organizations spend less than 5% of their time on unplanned work?

Where does your organization fall within these statistics? Do you really know?

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The Goals Of Change Management

Now that we have your attention, let's first look at the goals of change management and then we'll move on to the individual steps to ensure it's set up correctly.

1. Ensure that standardized methods, processes and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, and to minimize the impact of change-related incidents on service quality, maintain a proper balance between the need for change and the potential detrimental impact of changes, and to improve the day-to-day operations of the organization.
2. Ensure all changes are assessed, approved, implemented and reviewed in a controlled manner.
3. Change management is responsible for managing change in all these areas:
   • Hardware
   • Communications equipment and related software
   • System software
   • Application software
   • Procedures and documentation related to the running, supporting and maintaining of live systems.
   • Unplanned changes (Theoretically these should never happen, but they do. So they need to be reviewed and procedures put in place to ensure they do not happen again.)

Note the inclusion of hardware and communications equipment in this list. These items are included because often companies have set up a change management process for applications and the running of live systems, but they let the IT department make their own decisions on changes to hardware.

Getting Started With Change Management

In answering the "What is change management?" question, let's begin at the beginning. Here's a checklist of the key things to do as part of managing change.

1. Build a leadership team and engage key stakeholders.
2. Start at the top with the executive team because they must embrace this new approach and motivate the rest of the staff.
3. Involve all levels of management within the organization.
4. Provide a "road map" to guide the behavior and decision making process.
5. This process demands leaders who will take ownership and will be responsible for making change happen.
6. Don't assume people understand this process. It's important to hold regular communications to reinforce the core messages about the importance of managing change.
7. It's important that leaders understand and account for the culture and behaviors at each level in the organization.
8. Leaders need to be explicit about the culture and the way to best support this new way of doing business.
9. Effectively managing change requires a continual reassessment of its impact and the organization's willingness to adapt to these changes.
10. Speak to people individually as they need to know how their work will change and what is required of them when the change program is implemented.

Why Is Change Management Hard To Implement?

A quick answer to "What is change management?" is that it's a tough executive responsibility. Why is that?

• There's a "race" to shrink time to market and time to value.
• Competition is fierce, so CIOs are under pressure to constantly upgrade existing systems, implement new technologies.
• Technology complexity is on the rise.
• Setting up such a process requires following multistep business process flows, regular meetings, producing lots of documentation.

Benefits Of Managing Change

Implicit in answering the "What is change management?" question is a discussion of the benefits of managing change.

• It helps to lower the risks associated with change.
• Eliminates resource conflict and redundancies.
• Learn from successes and mistakes in the past.
• Helps you to save money and lost time.
• Enables managers to make contingency plans based on real time project status.
• Increased internal teamwork and external end user satisfaction.

Best Practice Change Management

To answer the "What is change management?" question, we also need to cover best practice change management issues.

• The keys to success, there are eight important steps.
• What is a Request For Change (RFC) how it works and why it is important.
• Who should be members of the Control Advisory Board (CAB), and why they are important.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and measurement.

For more on this topic, visit our "Best Practice Change Management" page.

Change Management Methodologies

Answering the question "What is change management?" includes these eight success factors in change management methodologies:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Clarify and share the transformation
3. Increase change capability
4. Establish communication
5. Stakeholder involvement
6. Leadership at all levels
7. Project integration
8. Organization performance

To learn more, visit our "Change Management Methodologies" page.

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