Automating your IT Change Management Process Minimizes Operational Disruptions

It is widely understood that an organization’s ability to manage change effectively is one of the most important survival factors in the new economy.  As more and more organizations are relying on IT to maintain their competitive advantage and to support strategic change initiatives, more reliance is placed on IT departments to maintain change management software to facilitate change with minimal operational disruptions.  Therefore, having a formal IT change control process and software becomes imperative and can also provide the following benefits:      

• Improved visibility of pending and historical changes
• Ensure process compliance and accountability with full audit capabilities
• Enforce risk management, testing and approval tasks
• Improve customer service by enforcing service levels
• Ensure changes are scheduled when resources are available
• Contribute to the organization's knowledge base
• Measure continuous improvement

The Change Management Software

Our SharePoint Change Management software uses proven technology and it is fully configurable to suit your change management methodology.  The solution is also completely open, reusable, extendable and supported. Features include:

• Electronic Change Request Forms ensures data does not need to be recaptured
• Centralized task management with notifications and multilevel escalations to manage SLA’s
• Automatically check resource availability and schedule updates to the RFC Outlook calendar
• Graphical real-time process status with reporting and auditing
• Delegation of authority with Out of Office capability
• Automatic archiving of the Request Forms

ITIL based Change Management Process Template

In this ITIL based Change Management process, new Change Requests are routed to the Change Coordinator for an initial assessment.If accepted, the request is routed to the Perform Impact Assessment Activity.At this stage, a shared collaboration site for the particular change request is created and processes initiate to perform the Impact and Risk Assessment tasks.After the Change Advisory board approves the request, meeting request are sent to assess resource availability.If available, the RFC Calendar is updated and Develop and Test change tasks sent out.Upon completion, the Change Management Request form, with all comments, approvals and supporting documentation for the Change Request is stored out for later knowledge reuse.

Change Management Risk and Impact Assessment Process

The main Change Request Process (shown above) also calls a sub process at "Perform Impact Assessment" step.  The sub process contains tasks for Risk Management, Effort Estimation and Testing Recommendations which can execute in parallel.  Once completed, information is passed back up into the main process.  The solution has the ability to model each step in the Change Management model as seperate sub process.  This feature is a powerful tool as it allows the organization to model complex change request processes by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable processes.

The Change Management Software adapts to your Methodology

The SharePoint Change Management Template already provides the process administration and infrastructure aspects such as security models, auditing, reports and task administration. It therefore allows organizations to start working on change management problem immediately and invite stakeholders to participate in interactive workshops where the change process model and Request templates to can be modified. This is done by dragging and dropping business activities and changing business rules to meet the ogranizations' Change Management Methodology.  The administration of the Change Management Process, can also be delegated to non-technical users allowing them to add and modify security permissions, set Out of Office and nominate substitutes, reassign work or move it to another step in the change control process.

Familiar Microsoft Office User Interface

Our software solution allows users to capture ITIL specific information on the Change Request form and it leverages technology most organizations already own. Such technology includes the popular Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) which provide the familiar Microsoft Office look and feel thereby greatly reducing or even eliminating any end user training required. SharePoint is used to provide a single and consistent access point allowing users to access all aspects of the solution. This includes:

• Submitting a new Change Request
• Viewing process status and statistical reports
• Drill down audit trail reports
• Identifying process bottlenecks or evaluating user performance by task
• Change threshold levels of business rules
• Perform process administration functions
• Filter, sort or export line of business data in list based views

Change Request Tracking and Reporting Features

Our SharePoint Change Management Solution has real time reporting capabilities which can pinpoint the status of any request. It is also possible to produce customized lists containing process information allowing users to apply filters or export into Excel for further manipulation or reporting. Out of the box reports include:

• Process Statistics (bottleneck Identification)
• Activity Instances Report
• User Performance
• Process Information showing (Audit trails)
• Graphical ViewFlow report showing the actual path followed

The ViewFlow Report (above) shows the actual Change Request diagram for a specific change.  Green=Path followed, Red=Path not taken, Blue Activity=Current step

Improve Turnaround Times with Measurable Results

Rich historical data can be collected from any of our solutions that are in production.The out the box statistical reports can be used to identify process bottlenecks in the Change Management Process.

These reports can be used by managers to identify productivity improvements areas based onquantitative data. Once these areas are identified, escalations or other process improvements can be applied to the change management process model and results can be measured against any previous version of the process.

System Requirements for the Software

• SharePoint 2007 (any version) for the Change Management site template
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft InfoPath or InfoPath Forms Services for the onboarding Template