Change management is a governing process in ITIL, and one of the most important processes in the service lifecycle. The process comes as a part of ITIL’s Service Transition publication, but it is the fact of IT life, that most of change management takes place in the Service Operations. I will talk about this disconnect in a future post.
In this post, I want to list out the role of an IT change manager and how he can make a difference.
Before I get into the change manager’s role, we need to remember the objective of change management, as everything, I mean everything that we discuss this point forward gravitates towards it.
The primary objective of Change Management is to enable beneficial Changes to be made, with minimum disruption to IT services.
To meet the change management’s objectives, the change manager must be somebody diligent and take an awful amount of load it seems, doesn’t it. Not really! If the process is set right, then the change manager’s job becomes easier in delegating parts of his job to people who have the right expertise to do it.
It is my hope that this post helps you if you are looking to switch to change management or about to face an interview for an ITIL change manager’s position.
Here are the activities that a role manager performs on a day to day basis. This list by no means comprehensive. This role can be performed by one person in an organization or multiple. In larger organizations, there will be one IT change manager and multiple IT change coordinators performing the following activities.
● Change manager acts as a primary control gate for the flow of changes into production (and non-production in some cases)
● Change manager performs sanity checks on the RFCs (request for change) received from the technical staff, project managers and in some cases, the business
● Change manager ensures that the proposed changes have a passable justification to perform it in the first place
● In some organizations, the change manager is entrusted with the budgets for performing changes
● Change manager enforces change lead times
● Change manager schedules the CAB (change advisory board) meeting
● Change manager convenes the ECAB (emergency CAB) when needed
● Change manager identifies the right stakeholders for the CAB meeting
● Change manager chairs the CAB meeting
● Change manager ensures that the focus of the CAB meeting is to dismember the change, part by part, analyze it from all possible angles
● Change manager authorizes changes to be implemented
● Change manager checks for conflicts between changes going in at the same time, or in very near future
● Change manager works closely with the release management team to ensure that the release activities are performed to the full satisfaction of CAB and the change manager
● Change manager recommends changes that can be standardized, when they are presented in the form of RFC
● Change manager works with technical teams to identify standard changes
● Change manager ensures that the overall change count goes down by leveraging on standard changes, and identifying changes that otherwise could be performed on the back of a service request
● Change manager performs audits on changes to ensure change management policy and process compliance
● Change manager triggers problem investigation for failed changes
● Change manager conducts regular trainings with various stakeholders to educate on the change policy and process
● Change manager prepares and publishes various reports to management and the customer
● Change manager works closely with the configuration manager to identify unauthorized changes
If you believe I have left out one or more activities, do add it in under the comments section. I will add it in the post giving you due credit.
