Change Management

Basic Concepts

The rest of this chapter will frequently refer to the concept of the Change Manager and the Change Advisory Board (CAB), so it is worth describing and distinguishing their respective roles:

• Change Manager: the person responsible for the change process and as such, he/she is the person ultimately responsible for all the tasks assigned to Change Management. In large organisations the Change Manager may have a team of specific advisors for each of the various areas.
• Change Advisory Board (CAB): this is an internal body, chaired by the Change Manager. It mainly comprises the representatives of the main IT services management areas. However, in some cases it may also include:
• External consultants.
• Representatives of user groups.
• Representatives of the main hardware and software providers.

Scope of Change Management

In principle, all non-standard changes must be considered to fall within the purview of Change Management. However, it is sometimes impractical to manage all changes this way.

The scope of Change Management must parallel that of Configuration Management: all changes affecting CIs included in the CMDB inventory must be correctly supervised and recorded.

In a similar way to when implementing Configuration Management, where it is advisable to establish "reference configurations" as means of simplifying the process (consisting of standard packages of hardware and software, for example, a reference PC with a predefined set of hardware and software components), it is important to create changes processes with protocols defined and authorised in advance, for example, in order to make changes to the reference configurations just alluded to.

These standard change protocols need to be drawn up carefully, but once defined they allow for more rapid and efficient management of small changes or those with a low impact on the IT organisation.