Uncoordinated changes to the IT service landscape are a frequent cause of cost-intensive disruptions. Considering that business processes today are heavily dependent on IT, these disruptions can lead to considerable costs.
ITIL Change Management is crucial for minimizing the risks resulting from technological changes. Every change is thoroughly checked before implementation in order to reduce potential negative effects.
ITIL Change Management is an IT Service Management (ITSM) methodology that helps organizations effectively manage changes to IT services, processes and systems and improve service quality for users and supporters.
The process is intended to ensure that standardized methods and procedures (hence ITIL Change Management) for implementing changes are established and effectively implemented. In this way, the process prevents unnecessary disruptions and acts as assistance in the case of failures. The goal here is to reduce external and internal risks triggered by change.
The implementation of change management according to ITIL subsequently increases the effectiveness and profitability of your own company.
There are several perspectives on change management. From a business perspective, from a risk perspective, in terms of dependencies, and from a competitiveness perspective.
Change management according to ITIL is a crucial process that focuses on planning, monitoring and implementing changes to IT services, processes and systems. The goal is always to reduce the risk of errors and disruptions to a minimum and thus ensure the quality and stability of IT services.
Basically, “change” means a change for an organization, which is also associated with risk. According to ITIL, the term Change refers to any change that is made to
These may be changes to hardware, software or the IT infrastructure in general. ITIL V4 classifies 3 groups of changes:
Standard changes are changes that are associated with low risk and follow a defined process. These changes are authorized by default and can be easily automated due to their standardized processes. Authorized here means that a well-defined set of changes (captured as standard) can be completed via a simple authorization process. For Standard Changes, one or two approval levels are sufficient for this.
Emergency changes refer to changes that occur unexpectedly and must be implemented immediately in order to prevent or at least minimize the effects of an emergency situation. This includes, for example, actions during a large-scale DDoS attack.
Normal changes are changes that are neither standard nor emergency changes and therefore form their own category. Depending on the type of related risk, these changes may be considered …
. This can be, for example,
The ITIL definition of change is therefore broad and encompasses all changes to IT services, systems or processes that are critical for the company. In addition, modifications in organizational procedures or processes can also be referred to as change. This means that changes are not only change processes, but also adjustments to software or approaches in a company.
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Change management is important because it helps to minimize the risk of errors and disruptions in IT services and thus ensure the quality of services. Without change management processes, unforeseeable effects on the IT environment can occur and have a negative impact on users, supporters and employees.
Here is an example: When a company decides to introduce a new version of its software, it issues instructions to install the update. However, the IT department ignores the change management process and installs the software directly on production systems without checking or approving the process.
After the installation, serious compatibility issues occur as a consequence, causing system failures and blocking access to business-critical applications. The downtime creates conflicts with users unable to perform their work and the support department tasked with restoring services.
Ultimately, the company has to use additional resources to rectify the problem, which leads to considerable costs and business interruptions. If the company had implemented change management processes and carefully planned and evaluated the change, the negative impact of the change on the IT environment and business operations would have been avoided – which is exactly why change management is so important.
Change Management, Incident Management, Release Management, Capacity Management, and Problem Management are all directly related, but do not mean the same thing. It is therefore important to consider each area individually:
Basically, the benefits of good change management can be broken down into the following five:
ITIL Change Management offers a high degree of control over changes to IT systems and processes. This ensures that changes are carefully planned, documented, and tested to minimize or eliminate the risk for disruptions and failures.
Effective ITIL Change Management ensures that changes to IT systems and processes can be implemented quickly and efficiently. This increases the efficiency of the IT department and ultimately reduces costs.
ITIL Change Management minimizes downtimes of IT services and systems. This helps you avoid costly unreliability in IT systems and processes.
ITIL Change Management enables you to continuously monitor and optimize your IT services. Improving the quality of IT services increases the satisfaction of users and supporters.
ITIL Change Management ensures that companies implement their IT services and processes in accordance with regulatory requirements (CLAs). In this way, compliance risks can be minimized.
ITIL Change Management helps you to implement changes to IT services and processes in a consistent and controlled framework. This ensures that the company continues to deliver consistent quality in its IT services and processes.
Effective implementation of ITIL Change Management enables companies to respond more quickly and flexibly to business requirements. Effective planning and implementation of changes makes it possible to deploy new technologies faster or make adjustments to IT services in order to remain competitive in rapidly changing business environments.
Change management ensures that changes to IT services and processes meet the highest security standards.
ITIL Change Management requires careful documentation of changes to IT services and processes. This results in transparent reporting that enables companies to better track and understand changes in IT services and processes and avoid them in the future.
ITIL Change Management promotes better collaboration within and outside the IT department. This provides the basis for successfully managing change in the future. The acceptance of change is important here. The successful change process ensures that the employees involved are brought together, that there is a consistent (rather than confusing) level of information, and that there is clarity in the process.
ITIL Change Management ensures that IT services and processes are viewed in a broader context. With this holistic overview, companies can quickly discover which changes are necessary to achieve long-term business goals.
Simply stating the benefits is helpful, but in the end it always comes down to whether an investment pays off for a company. This is where the cost-benefit analysis comes into play: the aim of a cost-benefit analysis for change management is to demonstrate the relationship between the costs of administration or implementation and the benefits that result from the approach:
Once you understand the benefits and advantages of change management, you need to know what roles, processes and information are relevant.
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In order to understand change processes, you need to know how they are put together and which components are important. For this, we need to clarify two terms in the first step, namely Configuration Item (CI) and Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
In order to assess the risk of changes, you need detailed information about the individual configuration items (CI) and their relations to each other. A CI is a part of the entirety of operating resources in a company and can include PCs, peripheral devices, telephones, all network components, servers, installation documentation, process instructions, IT services and also software – in other words, all components that can trigger a change due to a malfunction.
Configuration Management captures and manages these components in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This means that changes can be controlled and, if possible, even automated, as all important components and their relationship to each other are collected and configured in a database.
Typically, change management covers the entire process from the initialization of the change (the so-called change request) to the review of the change after implementation. The focus is always on ensuring that all changes to the IT infrastructure are subject to a controlled assessment, approval, implementation and review process.
This requires going through several steps in the change management process.
An ITIL Change Management process is typically a structured sequence of steps designed to manage changes to IT services, systems and processes.
The steps may vary depending on the company and IT environment. However, the goal is always to implement changes in an effective and controlled manner to minimize the risk of errors and disruptions and to ensure that the quality and efficiency of IT services are maintained or even improved.
Planning Changes with sufficient lead time is critical. This is precisely recorded in the Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC): a schedule that contains details of the approved changes and their planned implementation date. This increases the accuracy of the change assessment and thus minimizes undesirable side effects and unprepared risks such as downtimes or a reduction in service quality.
Here are some of the steps typically included in an ITIL Change Management process:
