HP Software and Evergreen Systems Change Management Webinar

HP Software and Evergreen Systems recently delivered a webinar on Change Management which covered:

• Best practices on Change control lifecycle management.
• Change acceleration with reduced complexity, cost and increased ROI.
• Real-world success stories on managing Change.
• Optimization of CAB efficiency and effectiveness.
• A fast tour demo of HP's integrated ServiceCenter, Change Control Management uCMDB bundle.
• Workflow analysis, CI (configuration item) collision and the importance of a universal CMDB.

Presenters were Don Casson, CEO, Evergreen Systems and Michael Eckhoff, ITSM Area Manager, HP Software

You can download the scripted presentation in two parts below:

Take Change Management From Firefighting to Fire Prevention: Part 1: Process Improvement

Take Change Management From Firefighting to Fire Prevention: Part 2: Technology Improvement

Also download HP Software's new product bundle: ServiceCenter 6.2 / ControlChangeManagement(CCM) and universal CMDB.

Detailed below are questions to answers that were posed during the webinar. If you have further questions please email info@evergreensys.com

Change Management Webinar Questions and Answers

Q1: This story looks good with all HP tools, but what about my existing investment?

A1: HP's R&D and Product Development strategy has and continues to be based on following standard ITIL Guidance and industry standards when available. A large portion of the R&D budget is dedicated to internal integrations of tools and open API's for client integration to existing tools.

Q2: About the Change Advisory Board - who should attend: managers, technical or both?

A2: A combination of managers and technical based on risk reduction, conflict scheduling and articulated remediation strategies. Unless you have an automated application & infrastructure mapping capability (automated CMDB functionality) then you need the "human" CMDB -- which identifies conflicts -- for effective risk reduction. Beyond that, manager levels typically make decision on prioritizing the scheduling, and reviewing completeness of planning for significant and / or high risk changes. The HP Universal CMDB, used in conjunction with the Change Control Manager tool provides the capability of a "Virtual CAB" with automatic user notification, comments, voting and approvals directly in the tool.

Q3: There is a lot of confusion around the CMDB - What are 3 main purposes?

A3: If change is the workflow of IT, then the CMDB is the knowledge store to empower decision making of all sorts. This is the primary purpose of the CMDB. Decisions supported include operational considerations / risk mitigation, business continuity, trade-offs, systems enhancements analysis, even capital planning considerations. Per ITIL -- it clearly supports all of the ITIL process areas in this way.

Q4: The outcomes for Change management are powerful but how much of the best practices come 'out of the box'?

A4: Actually a fair amount of the best practices are captured in the technology -- and it is likely that 70-80% will be useful for you. The processes and policy activities really focus on the way the organization flows the work of IT -- from silo by silo, to an integrated enterprise. Communicating the change and the need for it, getting the flow of work to meet your business needs, and then driving the adoption to business success -- these are the majority of the work.

Q5: There are many vendors offering point solutions, what makes HP better?

A5: The answer lies in the question. In every area of technology HP's solutions are rated either 1 or 2 -- always highly. But it's not the sum of these parts that matters -- point solutions are what have created the complex, expensive nature of IT operations. Over half of IT time is spent maintaining integrations between different vendors' and outsourcers' solutions and technologies. What a waste! What makes HP better is simple -- HP engineers and supports highly functional integration between its solutions end to end -- so you don't have to. And not just sharing data -- but enabling integrated workflow, and evolving into a common management dashboard approach.

Q6: Is the CMDB to be a continued component of ITIL? There are rumors about it being discontinued...

A6: ITIL Version 3 continues to recommend a CMDB as a primary function. The capabilities of commercially available CMDB tools, like HP's Universal CMDB have been incorporated into ITIL v3 to take advantage of automated discovery and dependency mapping, integration into Strategic, Application and Operational tool sets and act as the hub for IT reporting and analytics.

Q7: Are there standard metrics? If availability is part of a metric, do you count approved outages against availability?

A7: Availability of service, past experiences and standard change windows are all used as part of risk scoring. From a process point of view, whether it is in or out the key is to report it consistently over time. The conservative approach includes planned outages in the downtime metrics -- which encourages better management of planned outage time since it does have an impact on the big number. If planned outages are not included in downtime -- then they do need to have a separate metric and be reviewed at the same time. Otherwise this may get out of hand.

Q8: How do you track custom software changes (CIs) with RFCs that go through development to production?

A8: Integration with software development lifecycle tools from HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center manages RFCs end to end. Change Control manager utilizes data from the Universal CMDB and accepts feeds from various change engines to correlate RFCs, provide impact analysis, risk assessment and show hardware and software collisions.

Q9: Do you think it's wise to have Technical Service Providers to assess the risk and impact of a chance they submitting to a change control system? Most TSPs would more than likely consider their non-routine change submissions as important work with high impact and significant risk.

A9: Assessment should be based on risk and materiality. Manageability and auditability of Change Request should guide the approval process.

Q10: Do you have a matrix to define the number of staff/activities required to manage Change management activities within the Change Management department to support all these tools for a company?

A10: From a workload perspective each company is different. It depends on the complexity and volume of change activities. A good way to get a sense for it is to look at the top 3-4 most common changes and look at the workload over the 4 phases of the change lifecycle. From a technical -systems administrator perspective -- systems administration for a process focused technology like what we demonstrated could run 10-20 hours per week.

Q11: Would you track custom software CIs in the Testing and Staging environments in your CMDB or just in the Production environment?

A11: If the change process begins with the initiation of a request for a development effort -- then, yes -- those software CIs should be visible early on as the change that need to reference them exists. If the change processes for Development and Operations are separate, then no, only begin tracking them when Ops has visibility into a new or changed CI.

Q12: Success of change management depends on integrity of CMDB. Should only certain levels of CI's be subject to change management?

A12: We need to balance pure ITIL with business needs, and what it is practical to manage and track. What really matters? Look at risk, impact from failures for critical business applications & infrastructure -- track these CIs. Look at compliance -- what do you need to be able to certify? Track those CIs. Track more not less if possible -- and always go to the business value of doing so.