Purpose
The purpose of Change Management is to manage the life cycle of impactful technology changes, enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT services. Change Management is strongly linked to Service Management, which revolves around providing users with assurance that IT services and systems that support the business will work as expected, when required. Unreliable changes that do not achieve their benefits cause adverse impact on the business as a whole, so the importance of controlling the change process is vital to business success.
Objectives
A key objective to Change Management is to keep abreast of the changes that happen in the business environment. This objective specifically states that while responding to the changing business needs, you should be reducing incidents, disruption to service, and rework. In this way, the process will assist with maximizing the value of the IT services provided to the business. Other objectives include:
- justify the change from a business perspective
- standardize methods and procedures used for efficient and prompt handling of changes
- assess and minimize impacts and risks to business operations
- reduce risk exposure
- define and follow development, test, and implementation plans
- communicate the change to organization stakeholders
- review the success of its deployment
Change Advisory Board (CAB)
The CAB meets once a week to review Change Requests. Prior to the meeting, CAB members review submitted Change Requests with their respective team members to determine if there are any questions or concerns regarding the change. These are brought to the formal CAB meeting, where an ultimate decision of approval or denial is made.