Pink Elephant Blog
Changing the Change Management Grind
Has your change management process become a grind? Are we just going through the motions because we "hafta" do it?
There's a lot of value in change management when it's put in the right perspective.
Why do we report on successful and failed changes? Do we ever change things to make them worse? No. So why aren't we reporting on the improvements we implemented? Every change is an improvement put into action and we are undervaluing them. Not only that, but rather than promote the fact that things are getting better, we encourage change fatigue and leave our customers wondering why IT keeps changing stuff on them.
Changes reported as improvements that can be categorized and published include stability improvements, usability enhancements, reliability improvements, etc.
At the front end of getting great value out of change management, we should be looking at and discussing why we are making the change in the first place. What is the business value the change will deliver? Are we considering how our customers will benefit from the change and ensuring that the change is coordinated and reviewed to make sure it delivers on its intended business purpose?
Change can be a dynamic and insightful process that coordinates the efforts of multiple IT teams. Your CAB meetings can provide useful information to every team in IT and help them to be aware of what's happening around them to create more informed decisions.
To get this value, we need to shift the emphasis in our change process away from getting approval and onto the change discussion. Approval is simply a byproduct of a well discussed and evaluated change that's ready to proceed to deployment. The discussion raises awareness of all the work underway, allows teams to recognize opportunities to collaborate, and uncover any conflicts or overlooked stakeholders. This will only happen if we can break the grind of simply pushing changes through the process and asking checklist questions about risk, impact, and communication; only to move onto the next change, asking the exact same questions all over again.
Change Management doesn't have to be an obligation and a barrier to getting work done – it shouldn't be. If your change management process is simply traffic-coping changes and conducting collision aversion, you're missing out on a lot of value!
It's time to rethink change management!
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