IT is a fast-moving field, and that means change is inevitable. But problems along the way are just as inevitable, especially regarding core IT functions that are central to doing business every single day.

The types of practices in IT change Management can vary widely in scope: major, standard, minor, and emergency—for example, following a security breach or damage to physical infrastructure. In this blog post, the term is used to refer to larger types of changes that affect multiple departments of your organization. These kinds of changes include:

• Transitioning to a new CRM system
• Implementing a new ERP system
• Migrating to a new data center—or, more often these days, migrating from on-premises to cloud
• Rolling out a new security solution
• Changing the company’s email system
• Launching a new website

Regardless of size, scope, and scale, one thing is certain: Organizations can’t avoid change. In fact, embracing change can be hugely positive, giving a business an edge and delivering ROI by letting it do more with limited available resources. Change can also pave the way to introduce more modern apps, solutions, and platforms that are more efficient and user-friendly.

Because they involve so many stakeholders, these types of major changes are often traumatic. The longer they take, the greater the chance that they’ll run over budget—or fail, creating the need to roll back any progress made so far, which can be costly to the organization as a whole.

But with a clearly defined process to guide organizations, they can avoid chaos and resolve problems before they can impact the business in any serious way. 

Let’s explore some best practices to navigate the stormy seas that change can bring and reap the benefits of more efficient, effective IT processes.

1. Develop a Change Management Policy

The change management policy should define the purpose and scope of change management within the organization. It will also set out the roles, responsibilities, and expectations for all stakeholders involved, as well as outline the process for managing changes. The policy must additionally address the process for requesting a change, evaluating it, approving the change, and finally, implementing it. 

For instance, a change management policy may set out how often the change advisory board (CAB) will meet, along with who is responsible for ensuring that requests for changes (RFCs) are ready for CAB review, to avoid wasting their time. It should also set out point people or departments for approving the RFC and overseeing the change during development and through the rollout process.

Top Challenges in This Area

Be careful. Simply having a policy isn’t enough: If the policy is ignored or not followed, it can lead to problems down the road, like missed deadlines, budget overruns, and service disruptions. Unclear roles can also cause confusion and decision-making delays.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Ensure buy-in by involving key stakeholders in policy development. (See “Best Practice #2. Establish a Change Advisory Board” for more on this!)
• Adapt to evolving needs by regularly reviewing and updating the change policy.
• Aid stakeholders by making sure the change management policy is easy to understand and follow.
• Ensure compliance by communicating the policy to all stakeholders and providing training on how to use it.

2. Establish a Change Advisory Board (CAB)

Businesses that have navigated a number of successful major IT changes generally attribute that success to a strong cross-functional CAB that includes representatives from various stakeholder teams (e.g., development, ops, security, executive, etc.). 

The CAB is responsible for reviewing and approving change requests (RFCs) before they are implemented to Ensure they align with business goals. These are “big picture” folks who will make informed decisions on approving, rejecting, or deferring changes. They also have an eye on the business’s longer-term strategy and budget considerations.

Top Challenges in This Area

CABs (and especially CAB meetings) can be slow and bureaucratic, delaying changes and making it hard to respond to urgent needs and potentially leading to resentment. A lack of diverse representation can also result in biased decisions; for instance, if developers are not included, they will resent any decisions that will impinge upon their workflow and create inefficiencies for their day-to-day operations.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Make meetings more efficient and tolerable by defining clear CAB meeting agendas and time limits.
• Minimize negative impacts by ensuring that all areas are included, including IT, business, and operations. 
• Bring in fresh perspectives by periodically rotating CAB members.

3. Implement a Change Request System

With a centralized system for submitting and tracking change requests, organizations can follow through on all RFCs, from the initial request to the final implementation. Businesses can take advantage of dedicated IT change management platforms, such as TOPdesk and WalkMe, or a more general IT management (ITSM/ITIL) platform such as ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and ServiceNow.

Either way, embracing a platform that facilitates IT change helps ensure transparency by providing real-time updates on change statuses. It can also automate workflows for faster processing and fewer human errors. However, when choosing an IT change management platform, it’s important to find one that’s easy to use and navigate so that users and admins can easily track the status of changes, identify risks, and generate reports.

Top Challenges in This Area

Too much reliance on manual processes (or trying to adapt a platform not suited to IT change management) can lead to lost change requests and tracking difficulties. In addition, inadequate visibility into change progress can cause frustration.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Achieve maximum buy-in by selecting a user-friendly tool that aligns with the organization’s needs. 
• Ensure seamless updates by choosing a system that integrates with existing communication channels (and a range of channels).

4. Prioritize and Categorize Changes

One of the most important roles of the CAB is to help schedule and prioritize changes. They should ensure that the proposed implementation timeframe is appropriate, in line with day-to-day operational demands on IT, and that it doesn’t conflict with the business’s needs and priorities. They’ll also need to assign appropriate resources to ensure successful implementation.

Prioritization will be based on the urgency, impact, cost, and risk of the change; this is yet another reason to include diverse stakeholders on the CAB so they can help identify hidden costs and risks, for example, during the planning phase. Incorrect change prioritization or categorization can cause problems, including missed deadlines, budget overruns, and service disruptions.

Setting priorities can be difficult without a clear picture of your network, assets, and resources. And yet, many organizations take on even major changes without these insights. Application dependency mapping (ADM) can provide vital data when it comes to setting priorities, such as how complex a given change will be.

Prioritization isn’t just “once and done.” Priorities must be regularly reassessed to accommodate shifting business needs.

Top Challenges in This Area

Failure to prioritize can cause challenges when it comes to allocating time and resources. While minor changes may be given a lower priority, neglecting these types of changes can affect user experience and overall efficiency, so they should not sit on the back burner permanently.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Ensure consistent prioritization by using a standardized classification framework, such as a risk assessment matrix, factoring in the impact, cost, and risk of the change.
• Maintain productivity and morale by balancing quick wins with strategic changes.

5. Develop and Follow Standardized Procedures

To ensure buy-in from every team involved, organizations must establish clear processes and procedures for change assessment, testing, and deployment; they must then document and communicate these procedures to all relevant stakeholders. 

Of course, creating standardized procedures isn’t always enough. When teams don’t follow established policies, it can lead to errors and inconsistencies. That’s yet another reason why buy-in throughout the process, including involving all stakeholders on the CAB, is essential.

It can also go a long way to ensure standardized procedures are easy to understand and follow, as well as to communicate them clearly and provide training on how to use them. (See “Best Practice #6. Foster Communication and Collaboration” for more on this!)

Top Challenges in This Area

Lack of standardized procedures (or lack of buy-in) will lead to inconsistent outcomes; the entire organization needs to be behind the change to ensure it succeeds. Skipping testing steps can result in system failures and downtime; these should be a part of all standardized procedures where necessary. 

Tips for Success in This Area

• Give all teams easy access to procedures and best practices by creating a shared knowledge base and keeping it up to date.
• Encourage continuous improvement of procedures by accepting open, honest feedback.

6. Foster Communication and Collaboration

One of the key factors that can lead to resistance to change and problems during implementation is a perceived lack of communication and collaboration. So it’s very important to inform teams about upcoming changes very early on in the process.

Create and maintain open channels of communication across all teams involved, making it clear that you’re counting on all stakeholders to be proactive and to speak up about concerns. This lets them know that they will be heard. Include a variety of communication channels to reach all affected stakeholders and keep them in the loop regarding planned changes, potential risks, and benefits. (Communicating benefits is essential to maintain positivity through more difficult change projects.)

Top Challenges in This Area

Poor communication can leave teams in the dark about why the change is being made and what their role is in rolling it out, and this can result in resistance. Siloed teams can be a red flag pointing to the presence of poor communication, as well as a lack of effective collaboration and problem-solving.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Implement regular status updates and progress reports for ongoing changes.
• Keep everybody in the loop: When things don’t go according to plan, communicate modifications to the plan early and often (as early as possible, obviously).

7. Monitor and Measure Change Performance

Change performance is often not monitored or measured, which inevitably leads to problems that could have been avoided. Most organizations have probably already incorporated data-driven insights and analysis in other areas; here, too, these will help refine and improve change management processes.

You’ll want to define important key performance indicators (KPIs) to help assess change success as well as improvements over time, such as:

• Downtime and disruption (obviously lower is better)
• Change migration time
• Change acceptance rate
• Schedule variance
• On-time change completion 
• Number of failed, backed out, or canceled changes

Once a set of meaningful KPIs has been established, these can be continuously tracked and analyzed to highlight the most challenging areas to target for improvement. Organizations can also monitor the progress of any particular change and measure its performance against their initial goals. This will also help identify and address problems early on.

Top Challenges in This Area

The absence of performance tracking, or when it’s done using values that are not meaningful, can result in unaddressed issues. Many businesses also find that if they’re unable to measure impact, it hinders efforts at process optimization.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Make KPI monitoring simple with dashboards and visualizations.
• Celebrate successful changes, and share lessons learned from setbacks.

8. Provide Training and Build Awareness

What may seem like resistance on the part of team members may in fact stem from a lack of training and awareness. Resisting change is part of human nature, especially if you can’t see or understand the benefits. To help circumvent this resistance and ensure the highest degree of compliance with the established change process, organizations can provide comprehensive training on change management processes, relevant to each stakeholder’s roles and responsibilities. 

It also helps to provide training on change management principles and procedures to all stakeholders. When you educate employees about the importance of change management and their roles, and help them feel like a valued part of the change management team, it helps foster a culture of adaptability, minimize resistance, and help employees embrace the benefits of change.

Top Challenges in This Area

Employees can’t handle change properly if they’re not provided with adequate training; resistance often stems from a lack of understanding and awareness.

Tips for Success in This Area

• Accommodate diverse learning styles by offering a mix of training formats (e.g., workshops, online courses) that are directly applicable to each individual’s role.
• Get off on the right foot with new hires by incorporating change management principles into new employee onboarding.

Making Application Discovery a Part of Change Management

Embracing these IT change management best practices will significantly enhance an organization’s ability to handle changes efficiently, minimize risks, and ensure a smooth transition toward continuous improvement.

And here’s one final, crucial best practice: In a world where every IT change project, big or small, has the potential to interrupt a business, it’s essential to understand the current environment before implementing any changes. 

Enter Faddom, an application dependency mapping platform that provides a comprehensive assessment of all IT infrastructure. When it comes to change management, this step will help identify all relevant assets and then develop a plan to mitigate any risks associated with the change project.

Most of the best practices described here will be easier to implement using Faddom to:

• Map your IT environment and identify all dependencies between any systems and applications that will be impacted by the change.
• Pinpoint potential risks from the change, letting you plan for a smoother rollout.
• Identify potential stakeholders to ensure successful collaboration every step of the way.

With Faddom, nothing falls through the cracks. It quickly and effortlessly—no agents, no credentials, no firewall changes required—maps your legacy and modern architecture from physical to virtual to cloud instances to ensure that nothing gets left behind or forgotten.

Faddom will help simplify even the most complex IT change management projects:

• Application change detection
• Impact analysis
• Root cause analysis

To learn more about Faddom, just start a free trial today!