While there are, without a doubt, more questions that will be asked throughout the change process, seven questions are considered essential as part of a change management model.
These questions are designed to bring an understanding of the balance of risk in change management to the live service and business functionality. They also get answers that facilitate informed decision-making and gauge the effectiveness of the processes employed.
They also minimize the risk of rejection at the point the change is logged.
Here are the 7 questions you should ask as a change manager:
- Raised – Who raised the request for change?
- Reason – What is the reason for the change?
- Return – What is required from the change?
- Risks – What are the risks generated by the requested change?
- Responsible – Who holds responsibility for creating, testing, and implementing the change?
- Resources – What and who do we need to make the change?
- Relationship – Identify the relationship between the suggested change and other requested changes.
Why Are Answers to These Questions So Important For a Change Manager?
Responding to the demands of running a business in today’s world, a world invested heavily in IT, is essential to develop a process that manages the need to evolve and change effectively.
Only by having an effective strategy can you minimize the risk of failure, service interruptions, or a complete breakdown of relationships with end-users, your employees, and even customers or stakeholders.
ITIL v3 and v4 and Business Perspectives Volume II offer these as insights to successfully deliver cost-justifiable and reliable change.
In today’s fast-changing environment, change managers must understand how to bring about change within an organization effectively. Every change must benefit the business, so all possible must be done to reduce the risks associated with any change.
With few change management initiatives reaching a successful conclusion, change managers can undoubtedly help matters by asking questions to ensure only those essential and relevant projects are carried forward and bring valuable benefits to the business.
A Closer Look at the Questions
Raised
With so many stakeholders and individuals in a business having the opportunity to submit change requests, it has increasingly become necessary to address authorization and accountability.
Having a centralized system that records all change requests and manages the approval and delivery phases will ensure clarity over all the business. An inclusive and consistent system will assist during audits.
Reason
Establishing the reason for the change and measuring this to an agreed standard using consistent analysis criteria across all business areas will ensure that high risk, minimal benefit, or excessive change requests are identifiable early in the logging process.
All significant changes will be assessed irrespective of the type of change against a set of measurable criteria to determine relevance and priority order and assist decision-making on those that go forward.
Return
Another critical influence on priority is the return expected from implementing the requested change. What are the benefits to the business?
This could be a financial, functional, or employee well-being return. Identifying the benefits will define the priority that should be given to the change request.
Risk
No change comes without risk. With proper consideration, we can undoubtedly remove or reduce risk, though. Risk analysis involves understanding the risk of implementation and considering the impact of not moving the change forward.
What would be the risk of not implementing? It is impossible to know with complete accuracy, but a degree of forethought must be given to establishing approximate risk and reward.
Resources
You may have decided that change is certainly worthwhile, the business benefits case has been satisfied, but thought must be given to moving the change forward. This requires both human resources and availability of infrastructure, budget, and capacity.
Having sufficient resources to manage the process is not enough. There must be adequate resources and capacity amongst those affected to learn and implement changes if you want to succeed.
Time must be given to ensure that the people element of change is managed equally alongside the technical and operational aspects.
Responsibility
Who handles creating the change and its testing and implementation? Accountability is essential.
Actions may well fall to numerous people, so activities and responsibilities must be traceable and enforceable. Actions must be measurable, quantifiable, consistent, and be reportable across the entire change, testing, and release phases.
Responsibility for delivering on time and budget, with open and honest communication to ensure that hurdles and issues are addressed promptly, with accountability for doing so must be maintained.
Relationship
In a fast-paced or complex IT environment, this can be incredibly difficult to monitor. Numerous changes often run concurrently and having a reliable, robust mechanism to establish relationships between changes that encompass all functional boundaries is the only way to avoid conflicts and failures.
You may at best only be able to take appropriate damage limitation measures in some instances, but you must undoubtedly have the means to identify clashes and conflicts.
Conclusion
An effective change management process can be enhanced by having experts in change management on board.
Whether you choose to do so by employing a specialist change management consultant or identifying key personnel within your organization to undertake change management training is likely to be a decision driven by the frequency and breadth of your requirements.
Whatever your decision, we are indeed in a time that will see an increasing need for change to keep up with changes in customer demand, technological advancement, and changes to the working environment for employees.
Again, when answering the questions, the change process must not lose sight of the individuals involved, the personal element to managing and prioritizing change if you are to combat change fatigue or see an abundance of failed projects. Employee buy-in is essential.
Change management requires communication, creating a visionary story, and allowing stakeholders and those affected time to adjust, accept, train, and transition.
The questions will provide definable basic guidelines to support your chosen change management processes, being incorporated into additional initiatives that support time and budget delivery.
Controlling change should be viewed as part of the integrated IT service and delivery.
Comments are closed.