Why do You need Standard Changes:

So you may have a fairly effective change management process in place within your organization? You, as a part of the Change Advisory Board (CAB) are pretty happy that any change related to any application is being scrutinized, a risk-impact analysis is carried out, approvals are obtained before development, post testing and prior to release on production. Every change in the production environment is documents, test cases and UAT approvals are kept as evidence. Nothing could be better, or can it? Well, the answer is yes. As a basic human nature we are always resistant to change. So also in any organization users will always resist any change management process as the general perception is that it needs to more bureaucracy. There is always room for improvement and making the process more efficient. Now that you have the formal procedures in place, it is time to think what type of changes are low risk, low impact, required to be done on a periodic basis? You may not have the answers off-hand, you need to dig a little deeper into those change logs, sit down with your IT team and analyze potential candidates that fit this little description I just mentioned. Let’s follow this approach and see where it leads. Firstly, have a formal process in place to identify, discuss implement and manage standard changes. Then identify the candidates based on the criteria above. The output is a list of standard changes, this need to be approved by Change Management as a one-time approval. Any such change requests coming in the future need not require approvals. Great! Now that you have a list of pre-approved standard changes, it is time to document Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). This will define procedures to be followed for every standard change, which will be responsible to implement changes, what should procedures be in case of failed changes and such. The SOP needs to be communicated to the relevant personnel and updated periodically to keep pace with the evolving change management process. The staffs need to be trained on how to follow the activities with the SOP when they receive requests for the listed standard changes. Regular monitoring and reporting would ensure any failures in implementing standard changes are addressed in a timely manner to maintain customer satisfaction. Also care needs to be taken to ensure that even though the list of standard changes is ready even this list is likely to change. Hence a periodic review of the list of standard changes needs to be made to ensure that they are still in line with business requirements. Some changes may get deleted from the list of standard changes while new changes could be added. Hence while reviewing the list it is also important to look at all the changes that have been made. This will give us a good idea of which changes are coming up more frequently and have low risk

Standard changes should be identified and implemented to make the change management process more efficient, especially in performing the day-to-day activities / operations that may otherwise require CAB approval on a daily basis. This will lead to increased customer satisfaction as well as give the Change Management team more time at hand to focus on high risk, high impact changes.

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About Author:

Kintu Racca is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: kintu.r@spluspl.com