IT Change Management
Structured change processes to minimize risk and maximize stability
Plan, execute, and communicate changes seamlessly
Plan, execute, and communicate changes seamlessly
Changes are inevitable but can bring confusion and disruption to your operations. These problems can be averted with a proper ITIL-aligned change management process with documentation, managment, and execution through an ITSM solution. We make setting up and executing proper change management simple, intuitive, and easy to use. From standard change management templates to impact assessments, your IT team can more easily minimize risk and maximize stability.
Drive Consistent Change Execution
Drive Consistent Change Execution
Easily execute step-by-step changes whiles assessing risks and impact
Easily execute step-by-step changes whiles assessing risks and impact
Changes alone can be stressful for any agent to execute against. With standard change templates created in advance, agents can execute on any change without fear of missing a step or approval in the change process. When changes involve any infrastructure, agents can easily attach CIs from the CMDB, and review those assets to better assess the potential risk and impact of the change on that system and its dependencies. Each change requested has a full audit history in the event any post change retro needs to be conducted.
Not all changes are known in advance. Agents, with proper permissions, are also able to create ad-hoc changes when there is no pre-defined change template ready to go. Each ad-hoc change request still follows all of the bare minimum requirements for proper change management process documenting.
Minimize downtime and impact on end users with standardized change management
Minimize downtime and impact on end users with standardized change management
One of the greatest benefits to having standardized change processes is the ability to more easily predict the impact of changes, provide necessary notifications in advance to users impacted, and ensure changes run smoothly so that systems are back up and running as soon as possible.
Change templates can also be made available to end-users as part of the service catalog, allowing end-users to request changes when needed; such as needing to change out a laptop or other hardware.
Get More on Change Management Software
What is change management software?
Change management software facilitates any kind of change within an organization. Such platforms help streamline change management processes and minimize the impact on employees’ daily routines.
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 that 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:
- 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 new company-wide technology or the implementation of a new security best practice.
- 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, resulting in an official Change Evaluation Report. These evaluations examine new changes 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.
- 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 go through a rigorous approval process, especially since more minute change requests don’t run the risk of financial repercussions.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 new company-wide technology or the implementation of a new security best practice.
What are common types of change management?
Change management tools 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 pre-identified 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 software for 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.
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, which you can configure 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, this ITSM change management software makes it easier to identify the connections between users, assets, and any other configuration items so you can better understand how each employee will be impacted by scheduled changes.
- It can also help facilitate the ITSM change management process through its robust change history. Retaining historical data allows users to track and store changes, view root causes of problems, and see the actions taken during the implementation process.
- Service Desk and its intelligence software can also help you identify changes with similar traits. It combines these factors into a single release to streamline deployments and reduce the need for multiple outages.
- This software is also designed to make the end-user experience—a key 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. Employees can leverage the portal to submit incidents, problems, and change requests easily.
A service desk with change management tools can benefit from a more consolidated change execution by aligning its Information Technology Infrastructure Library (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.
What are best practices for using Service Desk for IT change management?
With so many moving parts to account for, it can be hard to find an efficient and effective software change management tool. Here are some best practices we recommend following to maximize features and benefits when using Service Desk as your change control software:
- Create a CCI for every change type: Doing so will help you organize and filter through your CCIs better by establishing priority levels, assignees, expected steps, and other identifiable criteria, so that all of your information and change processes are easy to find.
- Include the change type and family within the CCI name: This makes it easier to skim through templates and focus on areas of concern more quickly. Think of categories like Network, Infrastructure, and Application.
- Organize custom templates: When change processes don’t exactly fit into Standard, Normal, or Emergency types, make sure that any custom templates you create are categorized in another identifiable way so that they don’t get lost in translation when you need to reference them the most.
- Assign relevant user permissions: This gives you and your team visibility over certain responsibilities, and holds users accountable for suspicious activities and configurations.
- Incorporate Incidents into relevant CCIs: Intelligence tools will notify you of Incidents that relate to a specific change process. Attribute them to the CCIs they belong to, so you can keep track of all historical data in the right place.
- Schedule requests in advance: Enable automation settings for repeat requests that have been performed before to save you time and avoid human error.
- Regularly update your change calendar: This helps you visualize all changes that are set to be implemented and how they align with your organization’s staffing availability, workload, and black-out dates to avoid potential conflicts.
- Stick with custom titles: Avoid redundancies that can cause confusion with specific titles that help you differentiate change plans and assets within your IT environment.
For a deeper look into Service Desk best practices, please visit our Change catalog page.What is a change catalog item (CCI) and how does it work?
A change catalog item (CCI) is a unique identifier for a specific type of change that an organization wants to implement. It helps manage and track changes throughout their lifecycle, ensuring that each change is implemented in a standardized and consistent manner.
When creating a CCI in the change management system, you can define the type of change it represents (for example, a software update or a hardware replacement.), as well as any additional information that will help you identify and manage the change.
For example, if you have a CCI for "Software Update", you can easily track all instances where this type of change is made across different systems and applications in your organization. This allows you to monitor the progress of the change, identify potential issues, and make adjustments as needed to ensure that the change is completed successfully.
What is change management software?
Change management software facilitates any kind of change within an organization. Such platforms help streamline change management processes and minimize the impact on employees’ daily routines.
“SolarWinds Service Desk is acting as a multiple solution platform for us. We’ve gone from six different platforms to one. It brings our departments much closer together.”
Gilad Vinitsky
CTO
The BLOC
Streamline change management processes, maintain consistency, predict the risk of hazards and reduce errors across the organization
Service Desk
Customizable change catalogs help standardize and streamline your change management processes.
AI-powered incident management capabilities automatically link incidents to the relevant CCIs for more efficient resolution.
Historical tracking and a comprehensive change calendar help you keep up with upcoming changes and past ones.
