In today’s world, full of challenges in every direction, be capable of managing changes, adapt for new era and new customers request is a crucial survival skill that all companies need, mainly the IT companies.
Also, how manage changes efficiently, in affordable time and direction at same time maintain your budget in reasonable limits? For do this it’s necessary to use an efficient approach: Change Management, also known as change enablement, an IT practice designed to making changes to systems and services while minimizing disruptions.
Innovation is a mandatory condition in business scenarios, companies need to implement continuous changes in systems and services, delivering products in more efficient and rapid ways, allowing their customers get the state-of-the-art solutions, to maintain their market share, and increase visibility to acquire new customers.
In this scenario, rely on an efficient standardized methodology for the entire organization is an important competitive differentiation.
What is ITCM (IT Change Management)?
Is a process designed to ensure “that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve the daily operations of the organization.” This definition comes from ITIL (formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library), the organization that first codified the IT change management process in 1989, and are designed to meet the regulatory standards and reduce incidents.
How implement it?
Define your goals to change.
Start point to execute a ITCM is understand in what point your company is, and the true motivation to implement changes.
In change digital era, the changes can occur in different intensity, involving since from most updated technologies, new system applications even the incorporation of a new culture.
The first task is define your goals.
Choose the methods and techniques.
The IT Change Management can be conducted for different methods and techniques, the secret is find a set most adapted for your company and business culture.
One of most used method to implement the ITCM is the ADKAR[1] model, which establishes five fundamental aspects to be managed:
Awareness of the need for change.
Desire to participate and support the change.
Knowledge of how to change.
Ability to implement desired skills and behaviors.
Reinforcement to sustain the change.
Communicate
Communication is one of the basis for Change Management. It’s necessary to communicate for everyone involved in the process, for generate motivation and engage the partnership in organization, therefore, practicing transparency before implementing change management and throughout its development is essential for achieve your goals.
Implement a communication system that is accessible for everyone, if the organization does not have a tool for this, can use even the whatsapp groups, the most important is that all people involved can know what, when and how to do.
Monitor results.
During the process is important monitor results all time, each task must be monitored to ensure that is running accurately and achieving the target goals.
Follow-up meetings, people feedback, monitoring indicators, spreadsheets, system tools, all can be used to monitor results and ensure that all is running ok.
Also, remember that results must be published for everyone, to guarantee transparency and accuracy.
A roadmap suggestion
Start.
In the initial phase, define and choose the team that will manage the process.
Define how the process will be implemented, adopt new techniques, tools, technical documentation, the performance expectations, and risk points.
Planning.
Keep in mind that every process have risks, identify the risk points and make a contingency plan. Publish this for everyone (keep in mind that all phases during the entire process must be published for everyone), do this for each change identified.
Plan for each change step, with their risks and contingencies, and people involved in.
Approve.
The entire plan needs to be approved by the appropriate decision-makers.
If the plan isn’t approved, it can be updated and resubmitted for approval again.
Execute.
After change management plan receives full approval, the team needs to implement the procedures, after each step the team needs to test and monitor the results.
If results are not aligned with the goals, the step needs to be reevaluated, updated and executed again.
If results are ok, the teams needs to document it, publish to everyone and communicate to corporation.
CAB – Change Advisory Board
Is a group of people who approve or deny change requests, is often made up for a group of people with knowledge and expertise in the process topics.
A change management process may be include standard, normal and emergency changes types.
Standard changes
A low-risk, pre-authorized change often initiated as a service request that can also be an operational change. After creating or modifying the procedure for a standard change, a full risk assessment and authorization is required.
Normal changes
A change initiative that has to be scheduled, assessed and authorized following a stated process. A local team or supervisor can authorize low-risk normal changes, while major normal changes may require board-level authorization.
Emergency changes
A change implemented as soon as possible and not usually included in a change management plan, which often expedites the process for assessment and authorization so that the change can be implemented quickly. These changes should be subjected to the same testing, assessment and authorization as normal changes, when possible, but scheduling and documentation are deprioritized.
Keep in mind: a solid change management process must keeps all stakeholders in the loop.
[1] https://whatfix.com/blog/adkar-model-what-is-it-and-how-to-use-it/
By Amilton de Souza Maciel, CEO at Spectrus Technologies