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What Is The Concept Of Change Management In ITIL?

It is a common desire of organizations to bring new, creative, and beneficial changes that are not only aligned with the market’s requirements but also aligned with their organization’s business goals. To accomplish this desire, organizations adopt different ways, methods, and tools that could help them in bringing new changes. They have to implement these changes carefully with complete planning. Now, you must be thinking about why they should give so much importance to the change process. Why don’t they identify a field in which change is required and simply deploy it?

The change management process is more complex than it seems from a far oversight. We said this because changes could be not only beneficial but also harmful if they are unplanned, poorly planned, or wrongly planned. That’s why organizations need to deploy it with complete planning. ITIL is also important in this regard. It is because it ensures risk-free and efficient organizational changes by providing a complete mechanism for change management. It provides several roles and processes in this regard. In this article, we overview the concept of change management in ITIL. We overviewed all processes and roles that ITIL provides for this purpose. So, let’s move forward to our main topic.

Change Management In ITIL

When we say the term change management in ITIL, we talk about a detailed methodology for bringing new organizational changes. ITIL provides a complete change management process. The change management process has been so detailed that, It pretended to seem ITIL developers are mainly focused on it. Several concepts, steps, and roles are determined in this detailed process. Following are some of these concepts, steps, and roles.

Change Management Roles In ITIL

Change management is an important part of the daily routine operations of an organization. It is because bringing new changes could be both beneficial and harmful. That’s why organizations need a detailed predefined mechanism for this purpose. ITIL provides them with that mechanism. As we mentioned before, ITIL provides some specific roles for that purpose. Here we have discussed these roles that ITIL demands from an organization to generate. The following are these roles;

Change Initiator

The change initiator is the person that identifies the field in which change is required. ITIL recommends that the change initiator should be a part of the service team or should be directly connected to it so that he can identify the ground realities.

Change Coordinator

Change requests from the change initiator are forwarded to the change coordinator. The coordinator further manages it and plans how it could be implemented. Moreover, he also oversees the implementation and after impacts of that change so that they could be prevented for the next process.

Change Manager

The change coordinator forwards the request to the change manager. The change manager is the person who sorts the change requests according to their importance, benefits, and possible harms. He is the person who decides which change should be forwarded for approval first. The role of the change manager is crucial in large organizations because hundreds of requests occur in a day in large organizations, and it is difficult to cover them without a change manager.

Change Advisory Board (CAB)

The change advisory board generally consists of an expert team of 5-10 members. This board keenly observed the change request and the proposed plan to deploy the change and mentioned its harms and possible risks. On this basis, CAB recommends whether the concerned change should be implemented or not. They can also recommend some changes to the plan.

Change Approver

A change approver is a person who is responsible for the approval or disapproval of a change. He is also a part of or directly connected with the change advisory board.

Change Implementation Team

The change implementation team also consists of experts in the field in which change has been approved to implement. They are the persons who deploy the plan in such a way as the above persons define it.

Change Management Procedures In ITIL

After briefly overviewing the roles that are defined in ITIL. Now, here is an overview of the procedures that ITIL recommends to organizations for their change management. Following are these ITIL recommended procedures;

Change Identification

The first step is to identify where and why change is needed. It is the most important step because if the change is not needed and you initiated it, then how could you get the desired returns? It could be disastrous if a change is needed, but you did not consider it to change. Change identification is the duty of the change initiator.

Change Planing

Once the change has been identified, the next step is change planning. It is also an important step because you could not get the desired returns if you did not deploy it with good planning. The change coordinator and change manager are responsible for the change planning.

Change Approval

After ultimately planning, the change manager forwarded the change request to the CAB. Change manager always forwards the change requests first, which are more important than others. CAB and the change approver are responsible for the change approval.

Change Implementation

After change approval, nothing can stop the change implementation. Change implementation is the process in which a highly experienced professional team is required. That’s why ITIL recommends that an expert team should implement change. For this team, ITIL uses the term change, implementation team. This team not only implements the change but also oversees whether the change implementation process is going the right way or not. In ITIL, a traditional waterfall approach is used to implement the changes.

Change Closure

After change implementation, the change implementation team and change coordinator keenly observe if there are any afterward impacts of change implementation or not. If there are some impacts, then the implementation team fixes it, and the change coordinator takes it in his record so that it can be avoided in the next processes.

Conclusion

Change management in ITIL pretends to seem like one of its main concepts. We have briefly overviewed the roles and procedures that ITIL has defined for change management. Through this overview, we learned that ITIL ensures a risk-free and efficient change management process by providing a detailed methodology to bring new organizational changes. So, we recommend using ITIL-provided methodology to implement the new changes.

Other Links

Organizational Change Management Checklist For Enterprises