Effective Change Management Requires Planning

On the other hand, he had a limited budget and couldn’t afford to pick the wrong package. Moore also decided to move deliberately so the process would disrupt his day-to-day operations as little as possible. As a result of his Internet searches, Moore eventually picked ChangeGear from SunView Software. The process, according to Moore, took a while. He talked to SunView Software for several weeks, and spent a couple of months planning and more weeks loading the IT assets into the software before it was ready for full-scale use.

Paul Smith, senior network engineer at Metafore Technologies, a division of Montreal-based IT solutions provider Hartco, approached it from a different direction. He needed to get a handle on changes to his operating environment, specifically Active Directory, so that he could allow changes to take place in an orderly fashion without unintended consequences – but also without giving assistant administrators too much access. In short, he wanted to automate the change process, remove manual steps and in the process eliminate most errors.

Smith said his company chose Ensim Unify to automate the change process. “It’s removed a lot of administrative overhead for my department,” Smith said, “and it’s saved a lot of time. We used to have a lot of manual steps for user management. We don’t have those steps anymore. From my own experience it has lowered [the number] of errors.”

As was the case with Moore, Smith did his research on the Internet and performed his own implementation. Because his goals were specific and limited, he was able to choose a package that solved his exact problem and implement it himself. “Implementation took not even an hour,” Smith said. “It was done with guided installation help [from] one of the system engineers from Ensim. An hour later we were up and running. No changes were needed.”

Organisational issues

Ultimately, change management is an organisational issue. While change management software can be a real help, if a company’s change process is broken or if the people handling change management don’t have the authority to enforce it, then change management software will only automate the chaos. On the bright side, users often report that adopting change management software led to organisational improvements.

“Do process first,” said Glenn O’Donnell, a Forrester Research analyst. “If you automate anything, it’ll just do it faster. If you automate a bad process, it’ll do bad things faster.” O’Donnell suggested that the fundamental action must be to get your head around the process and what the process ought to be.