Major Change Management Activities
All of the major change management practices address a common set of core activities that start with a request for change and move through various development and test stages until the change is released to the end users.
6 slides · 2 min read · Domain 7
From first to last, each step is subject to some form of formalized management and decision making; each step produces accounting or log entries to document its results. Well-structured change management practices include these activities:
Change Initiation
A Request for Change (RFC), which can result from user or customer suggestions, help desk problem reports, or other inputs, typically addresses:
- Identification of change requirements
- Risk assessment
- Change prioritization
- Documentation of the RFC
Change Review and Approval
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These processes typically include:
- Evaluating the RFCs for completeness
- Assignment to the proper change authorization process based on risk and organizational practices
- Stakeholder reviews, resource identification and allocation
- Appropriate approvals or rejections
- Documentation of approval or rejection
Implementation and Change Evaluation
Depending on the nature of the change, a variety of activities may need to be completed. These generally include:
- Scheduling the change
- Testing the change
- Verifying the rollback procedures
- Implementing the change
- Evaluating the change for proper and effective operation
- Documenting the change in the production environment
Rollback authority would generally be defined in the rollback plan, which might be immediate or scheduled as a subsequent change if monitoring of the change suggests inadequate performance.
Release and Deployment Planning and Control
These activities may also be part of an organization's processes and practices. ITIL and others differentiate these two events to reflect that some development processes may involve separate environments for prototyping, development, integration, developer testing, acceptance testing, and security assessment and testing.
They may also need to manage the movement of systems elements to separate production environments that support different business or reliability needs. Release is the movement of a system or a change package into a production environment for immediate use by the end users. Deployment refers to any controlled, inventoried, and managed movement between other environments.
Many organizations will bundle changes into a package for development, test, deployment, and release planning purposes. Bundling of changes into packages is quite independent of the development management methodology being used.