Change Management Overview

Change Management Overview

IT Systems and business processes are becoming more complex, and more inter-connected than ever before.  This is why it is important to manage the changes to such systems.  Maintain optimum up-time and service availability to your clients by ensuring that any changes to any systems, services or infrastructure is handled in a controlled and calculated fashion.

Change Management is the discipline that allows you to plan, track, approve, schedule, implement and review your changes in the best possible way in order to provide the best outcome for the business and all concerned.

Every organization implements change management differently in order to suit their particular needs, however, there are a few general concepts that are widespread.

Benefits of Change Management

Benefits of effective change management include:

  • Avoid system outages and down-time
  • Ensure the continuity and available of services and systems
  • Improve communication between stakeholders of systems
  • Document system changes
  • Get proper approval before any change is performed
  • A better understanding of the relationship between corporate assets, systems, people and services

Types of change

Standard change

A standard change is a well known, well defined change with known low-risk which is often pre-approved - that is, it doesn’t require a formal approval process in order to be implemented.

Normal change

A change that arises out of necessity - often from the detection of a problem, or point of failure in a system.  May require approval to implement.

Emergency change

A change that arises when an unexpected matter arises that requires urgent documentation, approval and implementation.  Examples include a sudden breakdown in vital infrastructure, a security threat, virus outbreak, or similar time-critical event that needs to be rectified quickly, or unexpectedly.

Security and Access to Change Management Features

Enable/Disable the entire feature globally

At a global level, the entire Change Management feature can be turned off withing HelpMaster.   Doing so will remove all references the Change Management, including menus, buttons, queues etc. Use the System Administration screen > General settings to enable/disable this feature.

Enable Change Management

Once Change Management functionality has been enabled globally for use, Change Management functionality is governed via a security/access model, similar to other features.  This allows organizations to control who has access to the Change Management functionality. Use the Application Security Roles to adjust Change Management access.

Enable Change management access

See Also

Change Request Life-cycle

Change Management Models and Best Practice

Change Request Templates

Creating a new change request

Approval Process

Workflow Approvals (Different from Change Request Approval)

Security and Access

System Administration

Application Security Roles