Change Management takes substantial work and it has real world impact when it goes wrong.
This year alone, some of our biggest retailers Tesco and Sainsburys fell foul of this, as did Greggs and McDonald’s. If IT systems fail to do what they need to do, as they did in these instances, it’s all too visible how customers are let down and the potential is to do lasting reputational damage.
There are some simple causes to this: overnight updates, for example, one of the above cases resulting in a lack of ability to enable Google Pay and requiring customers to pay by cash, while queues begin to mount. It’s all easy to imagine the damage to a consumer brand in this instance, particularly when social amplification is the new consumer forum for complaint.
Testing software before you encounter failure rates is key, but never should you be exposed to failure rates with this level of real world impact. Whether it’s due to third party systems or the companies themselves, their brand will be the one in tatters due to the end customer experience. Enter Change Management and the possibility for, if done right, the prevention of these kinds of enormous IT failures.
A drifting IT infrastructure
However, there is a big but. A poll earlier this year at IT Service Management conference Pink24 showed that a shocking less than 50% of changes go through approval and scheduling processes.
The ever-evolving nature of technology, including cloud scaling, infrastructure as code, and frequent updates such as ‘Patch Tuesday’ means that organisations must constantly adapt to change. However, this constant change introduces challenges such as “drift”—a term that refers to the unplanned deviations from standard configurations or expected states within an IT environment. Think of it like a pesky monkey in the machine. Drift can occur subtly and often goes unnoticed until it causes significant disruptions. It also increases uncertainty and doubt in the organisation making Change Management and Release Management harder, creating difficulties to plan and execute changes safely.
Crucially, drift is hard to identify without tools that know what to look for. To be effective, Change Management needs to be able to detect and understand drift in the environment to have a full understanding of Current State, Risk Assessment and Expected Outcomes. If it is unable to do so, this attempt will be unsuccessful.
To address these challenges, the traditional Change Management process—which involves manual steps like change identification, planning, assessment, implementation, and review—must evolve into a more automated and integrated system. But how do organisations know if they are doing the right things to adhere to this?
Here are three questions they might ask themselves:
1/ Firstly, can you satisfy governance checkpoints, such as security checkpoints? Change Management/Enablement policies and corporate blackout windows?
2/ Do you know the state of things; i.e. is your device where it should be? Why is that device how it is? How can you plan for the future if you don’t know the current state?
3/ Do you have tools in place for automated change reconciliation? This process ensures that changes occur as planned and helps identify and rectify any deviations automatically. Tools designed for drift analysis and change reconciliation, like those demonstrated in ServiceNow’s Service Operations Suite, offer substantial improvements in efficiency and accuracy.
By automating change verification, organisations can significantly reduce the compliance burden and ensure that all changes are properly documented and aligned with governance policies. This approach not only enhances the reliability of the IT environment but also allows for a more proactive and responsive change management process, ultimately leading to better service delivery and higher customer satisfaction.
Change Management success
Truly effective Change Management in today’s dynamic IT landscape requires addressing the issue of drift through automation and integration of change reconciliation processes. Modern IT environments are complex and remaining fearful of drift is understandable, but these tools go a long way to guaranteeing a risk-free environment with no disruption.
Better yet, this ensures that organisations can maintain a stable and secure infrastructure while adapting to the continuous IT changes needed to keep pace.
Ultimately, an organisation’s priority should be on not letting customers down. If consumers feel the negative effects of your Change Management approach, the fallout can be catastrophic and your organisation stands on shaky ground, whether its IT infrastructure boasts all the bells and whistles or not.
About the Author
Jon Dedman is director at Cloudhouse. Cloudhouse is experienced in problematic application migration and config monitoring systems to fix the unfixable and modernise any IT estate – whether it’s run on-premises or in the cloud. With two proven solutions; Alchemy: Cloudhouse Application Packaging Solution modernises IT estates by fixing unfixable apps and moves them onto a supported operating system. Guardian is a vendor-agnostic monitoring tool providing insight and integrity validation alerts. Cloudhouse helps businesses make more of what they have.
