Change Management

Service Management change management will give you better control over your change process and help you implement changes with minimal risk. Service Management can ensure that all aspects of each change, such as planning, risk assessment, and tracking the implementation, are effectively managed. Service Management that tracks changes from start to end can work wonders and enable your organization to better manage its infrastructure with well-planned and executed changes.

Service Management supports the following change management process steps:

Submission: The first step is initiating the change. This involves collecting basic change information like the change type and priority, assigning change roles to the responsible parties and initiating change requests.

Planning: A well-planned change is fundamental to successful change implementation. It is important to get the necessary approvals required to implement the change. Details like the impact and rollout plans should be clearly documented and conveyed.

Approval: Next, the change plan needs to be approved by the change control board (CCB) that has a stake in the change or the organizational infrastructure affected by the change. CCB helps organizations group relevant personnel to easily manage approvals.

Implementation: Once the necessary approvals are gained, the change can be implemented. Organizations can track and manage the implementation of changes by creating tasks or using a project.

Review: Next, a post-implementation review is carried out to ensure there are no deviations in the implementation and that any issues are ironed out before the change is closed.

Closure: This is the last step in the change management process. The nature of the completed change is recorded as successful, failed, or incomplete. Recording the right closure code makes an organization's metrics much more accurate and useful.

Proper implementation of Service Management change management would yield the following benefits:

• Improved alignment of services to business requirements
• Increased visibility and communication of changes to both business and service-support staff
• Improved risk assessment
• Reduced adverse impact of changes on the quality of services and service level agreements (SLAs)
• Improved assessment of the cost of proposed changes before they are incurred
• Fewer canceled changes and back-outs performed more efficiently and effectively
• Increased productivity of users as less disruption and higher-quality services
• Increased productivity of key personnel, reduced number of urgent changes and the cancellation of erroneous changes
• Greater ability to absorb a large volume of changes
• Improved quality of service and professional approach

Service Management change management can help your organization continuously improve the infrastructure and processes, as well as keep up with industry trends by ensuring smooth implementation of necessary changes without affecting current service operations.