Hi. I am Debbie Ingram, Senior Manager of Market Strategy for Numara® Software.  Part of my role is to represent the voice of our customers in the market. I talk to our customers constantly about the real world issues on their minds in managing their IT organizations and delivering services, including how they’re using automation and IT processes to solve these issues.  Like many of my colleagues at Numara Software, I have been in the b-to-b software market and working with customers for over 15 years.  My goal with this blog is to share with you some of the thoughts and insights I have learned from our customers, including where they’re finding both success and bumps in the road as they move forward in this challenging economic time.

The Change Management Balancing Act:                                                                    
Getting To It, Staying Current and Getting It Right    

Outages are up. Staff Members are tasked with more than what’s humanly possible. Your budget just got cut again. Communication is slipping. Users are not being reasonable and sometimes going maverick and doing their own things. Management is pushing for more controls on users, how resources are used, and status  reports. Sound familiar? The balancing act challenge…. What’s critical for the business yet feasible with the resources available today

Getting Back to Managing Change

The importance of change management processes and formalizing them in an organization seems to continue to increase as time goes on. Our economic constraints today could remain tight in the IT environment for quite a while. I hear our customers talk about their struggles with getting to implementing or advancing their change management processes as they’re working to deliver services with less than what they’re used to. They also have the added challenge of pressure over them to find new ways to continue cost reductions and demonstrate their value to the business in ways they never had to before. At the same time, unexpected changes are causing them added pain as they’re faced with the clean up and answering to management at times about why they didn’t know about them. Staying on top of it all is an increasingly difficult situation and they’re turning to automation to help them when it’s possible.

How Will You Know If You’ve Done Too Much or Too Little?

I’ve been hearing about the need to really spend the time to understand what changes are the most critical around the business, not just in IT, and understand initiatives or projects coming up in other parts of the business that could directly or indirectly cause a change impact to IT. It seems that, in some cases, not enough time is spent on this key element of the process to make change management align with the overall business. What’s happening around you in the business outside of IT that could potentially cause unforeseen gaps, outages, or unplanned costs?   If thinking about this is not done up front, it will get done later and cause delays and frustration.

I’ve also heard stories recently from customers around “lessons learned in implementing change management processes”. Some customers have implemented baseline change and approval processes and found that things are still missing – forcing them to reassess their process after a few months. Then, they have implemented additional changes and controls to expand a wider net of control. I’ve also talked to customers who have implemented aggressive, complex change processes upfront and had to regroup shortly after they have seen that it was just too much for the business to bear. Some have found that with the reality of our economy today and reduced resources around the business, in and beyond IT, they can’t sustain these deep processes now, the business goals have changed, and they have to regroup.

Compliance: Turning Up the Heat on IT

Compliance with internal and external governance requirements has driven many customers to build automated audit trails and reporting to demonstrate compliance and help show their value in minimizing risk to the business. Audit requirements seem to be getting more complex as senior management and financial groups are more involved in IT and creating strong tracking has become increasingly critical.

The Path to Better Control

Start with identifying what’s changing without you – now - and what’s impacting your ability to do your job. From there, determine what’s impacting the business the most – especially what’s causing increased or unexpected costs or slowing down operations in some way within the business.

Some customers are turning to the ITIL® service lifecycle approach to ensure that they are implementing a standardized set of change processes with their incident and problem management, even IT asset management in some cases. They like to process value that ITIL brings with a standard set of terminology and processes for full a full change management lifecycle.

The take away I’ve gained from these discussions is that managing change is a constant, evolving process which can be daunting, but it can be done effectively and there is hope. It seems that the most successful implementations are the ones where change processes are implemented in stages, with constant checks on the results of the current stage, measurement on what’s working and what’s not through reports and auditing the results, and rechecking the business needs before moving to the next stage.

For More Information About Managing Change:

• “Six Strategies for Managing Change”: Change Management Tips Article from Numara Software
• ITSM 101: Change Management Processes article on SearchCIO.com by George Spafford, an industry expert and principal consultant on business and IT operations.  Posted: Jul 14, 2009