As an infrastructure project manager working in a large organisation, quite often you will have to liaise with the change management process and change committees.
ITIL definition
<Change Management aims to control the lifecycle of all Changes. The primary objective of Change Management is to enable beneficial Changes to be made, with minimum disruption to IT services.> (The ITIL Wiki)
What is a change?
Change can a hardware maintenance routine, application patching, physical migration, firewall rule implementation, servers decommissioning or a zone test.
Basically, anything that will impact IT services, in particular production systems.
A change management checklist
Below are some key elements to consider when raising and presenting a change:
- Why is the change necessary and to which project it belongs
- How will it be implemented, what team(s) will work on it and when?
- What services will be affected? how sensible they are, what category (e.g. CAT A)
- What are the SLAs? what time are you planning to have an outage?
- How many users (internal or external) will be affected? will you notify them in advance?
- What tests will be performed? e.g. penetration tests, high availability, shakedown tests, etc.
- Do you have a back out plan in place? will the roll back complete before business hours?
- Are other concurrent changes happening on the same night that might affect yours?
“Deciding what to change is one thing. Making changes stick is another.” (*)
