IT Service Delivery leaders (Service Desk, Desktop Support and ITAM) tend to focus on Incident Management while seeing Change Management as a separate process or endeavor. Understanding the interconnectedness between Incident Management and Change Management is key to creating or refining an effective strategy for your organization’s maturity in our ever-evolving digital world.
What is Change Management?
IT change management can be succinctly defined as a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. Although there are varying Change Management methodologies, all formal and informal change management programs have the following key elements in common:
- Change planning and implementation
- Customer communication
- Training and support for new or revised processes
- Change monitoring and change impact evaluation
One common thread that I have found regarding Change Management programs is that among my fellow IT Service Delivery professionals, the change management program is often viewed as separate from their primary work of managing customer incidents and fulfillment tasks; however, the most effective change management programs have interwoven tight integration and communication between their change management process and the incident management process to the betterment of both.
How are Incident Management and Change Management connected?
When properly aligned, effective incident management can support all the key elements of any Change Management program. Here are a few recommended strategies:
Change planning and implementation: Continuous feedback from the IT Service Delivery Incident Manager plays a vital role in ensuring that organizational changes include the customer perspective and highlight any potential customer impacts. Change planning should never happen in a silo and the customer impact perspective should be considered in every phase of any successful change. Feedback on relevant customer incidents provides this perspective and can serve to highlight potential customer impacts of the change.
Customer communication: Clear and frequent customer communication is critical to any successful Change Management program. All too often, customer communication is scheduled for the final or “go-live” phases of the project. Tightly integrated Incident and Change Management programs implement proactive communications to ensure that future infrastructure changes are advertised to customers as an integral part of incident-related communications. This is achieved by ensuring that front-line support teams are kept abreast of customer-impacting projects and timelines.
Training and support for new or revised processes: I have witnessed seasoned Change Management professionals tremble in fear at the prospect of re-educating end-users on new processes. This is where Incident Management shines, but often incident managers are left out of the conversations regarding the re-education of end users and are only looped into the discussion when they receive a support call regarding a recent change. Include your incident management team on the training discussions early to get the customer perspective and to provide early orientation to the change to your support teams. This provides a huge boost to change acceptance for customers and peer support groups!
Change monitoring and change impact evaluation: Customer feedback from the Incident Management program should provide the Change Management program with meaningful feedback regarding customer issues, customer acceptance and customer suggestions for continued improvements.
3 digital or ITSM strategies to implement
Here’s what you can do to ensure that your organization is maximizing the effectiveness of its change management program:
- Ensure that your ITSM system is configured to collect and carry incident information from incident management to change management modules in a useful way and that your support and change teams are trained in using this functionality.
- Provide collaborative workspaces within your ITSM system for Project and Incident frontline workers to continually exchange information regarding ongoing projects to reduce silos.
- Ensure that your customer-facing ITSM portal provides information on upcoming projects and major incidents that may impact their experience.