Reader Question:  I am interested in hearing examples or cases where a "lite" version of ITIL change management was implemented. How was the departmental culture addressed to achieve buy-in?  Which service or application was chosen as a starting point? What advice do you have for small departments (15-20 people)?

Third Sky Expert:

Reginald Lo, Vice President of Professional Services Third Sky
with contributions from Dick Szymanski, Director of Education, Third Sky

In order to change culture so people become motivated to manage change:

Make sure you explain

Why is change management important to the institution?
You can present evidence, such as number of customers/users impacted in recent changes that had issue to demonstrate why change management is important.

What’s in it for me?
It’s important to explain how their life will be better, e.g. less fire fighting, less re-work, etc., by adopting a best practice

Make sure you involve key players in a team approach to

• Define issues what is most painful), prioritize and address
• First cut at policies that can/must be agreed (i.e.what qualifies as a standard change, emergency change, ...) deferring contentious ones for later

Make sure you provide training

• Recognize their concerns and explain how the process addresses it, e.g. how the process balances risk and bureaucracy

Measure & Reward

• Measure the effectiveness of change management (or the pain caused by poor change management) and make it visible
• Identify good behavior and reward it. For example, you could recognize an individual during a team meeting who followed the change process and actually avoided having a failed change

Since your department is small, right-sizing Change Management is critical for success. Consider:

• Phasing in Change Management focusing on high risk changes first. This means you need to establish a risk matrix or an agreed mechanism for measuring risk. You’ll get less resistance during early adoption and once the habits are ingrained, you can expand the scope of Change Management.
• Balance the level of documentation required, e.g. if the change is low risk, less documentation; if the change is high risk, be more disciplined about what is documented
• Balance the level of approval required, e.g. if the change is low risk, may be a manager’s approval is all that is needed; if the change is high risk, maybe it needs to be discussed at the next CAB meeting

More on Change Management

• Boundaries:  Request Fulfillment & Change Management
• Which Metrics Do I Choose for Change Management?
• Streamline Change Management
• Change EXCELerator:  A pre-packaged Process & ServiceNow update set from Third Sky and Navigis