Change and Release Management Engagements

In the infrastructure world, Change Management means updating critical technical systems before failures can impact revenues and customer goodwill. Change Management helps organizations balance technical and business risks, and Evergreen Systems understands that it's more than pumping change requests through an administrative process.

Inserting changes with errors can amplify the problem throughout the enterprise with devastating consequences. Change and maintenance activities can account for up to 40% of IT people costs and as a result, can have perhaps the greatest impact on both budgets and IT performance metrics.
And yet redesigning change management is anything but trivial, and requires significant modifications in people, processes and systems.

A Change Management engagement with Evergreen Systems helps the client with:

• Designing new workflows
• Defining new roles and responsibilities
• Collecting different types of data
• Managing service levels
• Acting on feedback from dashboards
• Integrating disparate databases

Change Management is all about the management of risk, and Evergreen helps clients categorize and measure risk in an effective but accurate fashion. Evergreen methodology promotes assessing risk by allocating time and attention according to the level of risk. For example, different approaches should be used for managing different levels of risk. Pre-approved 'routine' changes may be managed using 'virtual' processes, allowing members to vote on changes remotely and only meet when required. Slightly less 'routine' changes might vary the virtual them by delegating changes to domain specific mini-boards. Using this hierarchy, only the highest risk changes proceed to a management level Change Approval Board (CAB).

Other tactics that Evergreen employs with Change Management include:

• Integrating business stakeholders into the workflow when a Request For Change (RFC), associating the change not only with its technical attributes but also with business process factors.
• Impact analysis, which assesses the impact of co-dependent CIs on each other along a spectrum of criticality.
• Collision analysis performed to resolve contention among a group of changes planned in a similar timeframe.
• Windows into learning, using techniques such as the Post Implementation Review (PIR) for harvesting lessons learned.
• Process feedback loops that incorporates measurable, self-correcting feedback.
• Resource management which assigns and tracks resources associated with changes for business justification.
• Continuous change which tries to minimize chronic abuse of the change process due to overly strict change windows.
• Continuous improvement which 'risk rates' ALL CIs according to their potential for risk, allowing some to be excluded from change control, but none ever to be excluded from configuration control.

Evergreen Systems consultants are experts in the area of Change Management and through a Change Management engagement, can reward any organization with increased efficiencies and additional IT capacity that can then be harnessed for achieving additional business objectives.

Change Management also requires prerequisite process improvements, including CMDB and Asset Management. To learn more about Evergreen's approach to those process improvements, review our CMDB whitepaper and our Asset Mangement whitepaper. Also see the complete Change Management Maturity Survey results.