How to Manage Change Effectively

Change matters. And how your organization manages change matters, including the best practices for change management employed by your corporate IT organization (and potentially third-party IT service providers). For example, consider an organization-wide technology refresh of personal computers where existing end-user devices are upgraded to newer equipment. It’s a massive undertaking that requires significant organization and the use of IT change management (and organizational change management) best practices.

But what’s the latest best practice for IT professionals? The short answer is that it likely depends. First, whether people are looking at the development or IT service management (ITSM) side of the (IT) house. Second, for the ITSM professionals, is the ITIL v3 2011 Edition change management process or ITIL 4 change enablement practice used (plus, an organization could use bits of both)? But let’s “start with the why” before looking at how to manage change more effectively.

Why change management (or change enablement) matters

Your organization is likely so dependent on technology that the need for IT change management is a no-brainer, with failed or unauthorized IT changes affecting business operations and resulting in an unacceptable outcome. However, change management offers more than minimizing downtime and business disruption.

Your organization’s IT changes should support business goals, not create roadblocks. Done right, change management will help ensure that your IT teams and business stakeholders are aligned, such that invoked IT changes consistently deliver business value while minimizing business risk.

Formal change management also reduces security and compliance risks. For example, when needed, change management practices help enforce proper review, approval, and documentation to maintain security and regulatory compliance.

However, ITIL 4 recognizes the need to support agility without sacrificing stability. The renamed change enablement practice brings in modern Agile and DevOps thinking – introducing automation and decentralized approvals to make change processes faster and more efficient.

Most of this blog’s readership is ITSM professionals, so I’ll focus on ITIL’s best practices. However, in the context of ITIL 4, not the ITIL v3 2011 Edition.

Understanding change enablement

In ITIL 4, change enablement’s purpose is described as:

“The purpose of the change enablement practice is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.”

It differs significantly from change management in ITIL v3 2011 Edition. In particular that:

• Change Authority is a new change role that can be a delegated team, a peer review mechanism, an automated approval, or business stakeholders, depending on the change risk.
• Change enablement encourages automated change pipelines using Agile and DevOps principles. Integration of change enablement with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practices will allow your organization to automate risk assessment and approval, reduce deployment delays, minimize human intervention for low-risk changes, and increase safe deployment frequency.

This move from ITIL v3 change management to ITIL 4 change enablement is intended to speed up change velocity, removing many of the obstacles previously present. ITIL is, after all, “documented best (or good) practices,” and the organizations that excel at change are now using DevOps and Agile practices, not what was advocated in ITIL v3.

If you want greater detail, the following comparison table will help.

ITIL v3 Change Management vs. ITIL 4 Change Enablement, how does it differ? @Joe_the_IT_Guy explains. #servicedesk #ITSM Share on X

ITIL v3 Change Management vs. ITIL 4 Change Enablement

ITIL v3 Change Management	ITIL 4 Change Enablement
Aims to minimize risk and disruption when implementing changes.	Aims to maximize successful changes while balancing risk and speed.
Primarily focused on controlling changes to services.	Focuses on enabling changes efficiently across all value streams.
Formal, process-heavy with strong CAB involvement.	More decentralized, leveraging automation and delegated authority.
Change Advisory Board (CAB) as the main approval body.	Change Authority model with flexible, distributed decision-making.
Primarily risk-averse, often causing delays in approvals.	Risk-based decision-making to balance speed and control.
Slower, sequential approvals, focus on documentation.	Faster, iterative, flexible approach supporting rapid change.
Minimal automation, manual approvals and documentation.	High automation with AI-driven risk assessment and approvals.
Control-oriented, ensuring changes are thoroughly reviewed.	Enablement-focused, ensuring changes are adopted efficiently and safely.

However, there are still three key change types to improve change efficiency and effectiveness

1. Standard changes. These are pre-approved, low-risk, and repeatable changes that can be automated or documented in runbooks.
2. Normal changes. These changes require risk assessment and approval and are handled based on urgency, complexity, and impact.
3. Emergency changes. These expedited, time-sensitive, urgent changes are needed to prevent or address major incidents.

How to manage change effectively

A good place to start is with what I’ve just covered – adopting a risk-based approach to change by using change types. These and the use of Change Authorities will ideally prevent the perpetuation of one of ITIL v3 2011 Edition’s common misconceptions – that every change needs to be presented to the change advisory board (CAB). This decentralized approach to change-decision-making allows your people to focus on high-risk changes while expediting low-risk changes. In contrast, the CAB can handle high-impact, business-critical changes only.

The next step is using automation to remove manual intervention where it’s not necessary. Not only is this integrating change enablement with CI/CD pipelines to help enable rapid deployments. It’s also leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-powered change-risk assessments to reduce manual evaluations.

Where to start with managing change effectively? Adopting a risk-based approach to change by using change types, says @Joe_the_IT_Guy #servicedesk #ITSM Share on X

All of this had already been covered in the introduction to change enablement. There are other opportunities to manage changes more effectively, though. For example, improving relationships and collaboration between IT and other business function teams – with your IT teams working closely with security, compliance, operations, business stakeholders, etc., to help ensure success.

Finally, as with anything your IT organization does, measuring effectiveness and identifying improvement opportunities is important. Various change-focused metrics can be used to both determine success and drive improvement, including:

• The percentage of changes implemented without incidents
• The average time from request submission to deployment (by change type)
• The number of changes that resulted in unplanned downtime
• The Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) for issues caused by changes.

However, not everything relates to your organization’s change enablement “mechanics”

A good example of a non-“mechanics”-related change enablement barrier is employee resistance to change. As with any change, employees and stakeholders often resist an agreed change due to their fear of the unknown, lack of trust, or previous negative experiences. This resistance can lead to change delays and low adoption rates. It’s, therefore, important to recognize that people can derail your “perfectly” delivered change (from a technical perspective) and tackle the underlying issues before they adversely affect a change.

ITIL 4’s organizational change management (OCM) practice will help. It offers guidance on addressing the many factors that cause change resistance and adversely affect change effectiveness. This includes activities such as:

• Communicating the change details (including the “why” and the benefits) early and often
• Involving the change stakeholders in the change process, and
• Providing sufficient training and support to those affected (if needed).

There are many ways to improve your organization’s change management effectiveness to balance change speed and stability better. If you would like to learn more about what’s possible with SysAid’s change enablement capabilities, take a look here.