Change is the only constant thing that people know of, according to a well-known adage. This saying is especially true in the IT and telecom industries. Thousands of changes to products, services, and infrastructure have been made regularly in recent years.
Although change is the only constant in this world, it is still crucial to consider whether some change forms are necessary. After all, some changes have favorable consequences while others have adverse implications.
Therefore, people are understandably standoffish when making changes, especially where their business is concerned. After all, you know what you have; you don’t know what you’re going to get.
Fortunately, in this article, you will see how Change and Problem Management increases the overall effectiveness of an organization’s processes. That way, you can make an informed decision on every change you consider implementing in your business.
Defining Problem Management
The practice of discovering and addressing the causes of problems on an IT service is known as problem management. It is an integral feature of ITSM frameworks.
Problem Management includes locating and resolving occurrences and recognizing and comprehending the underlying causes of those incidents, and determining the most effective way to eliminate those fundamental causes. Furthermore, choosing the reason has little benefit to an organization if it is a one-time procedure conducted by a siloed team. Therefore problem management should be a continuous and widespread activity across many teams, including IT, security, and software developers.
Remember that an event may be over after service restoration, but the problem will persist until the underlying causes and contributing elements get addressed.
Defining Change Management
Change management, also known as change enablement, is an IT technique that aims to keep IT services running smoothly while changing important systems and services. Adding, modifying, or eliminating anything that could directly or indirectly impact services is considered a modification.
Change management strategies should reduce incidents and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. The procedures ensure that changes to IT infrastructure and code get handled efficiently and quickly. Modern change management methodologies break through silos, give context and transparency, eliminate bottlenecks, and limit risk, whether an organization is launching new services, maintaining current ones, or fixing bugs in code.
Both change and risk management need tracking and linking modifications to produce an auditable record. Organizations may alter their practices in a sensible way that balances risk and speed because of the capacity to draw on data regarding prior modifications and their success rates.
Traditional change management is frequently unduly slow, process-heavy, and overworked, whereas data-informed, adaptive techniques seek efficiency.
Change management is hard, bureaucratic, and painful since it deals with risk and compliance, auditability, and cross-team cooperation issues.
But it does not have to be like this.
Change management may lead to fewer incidents, less stress on your teams, and more time spent delivering value to customers with the right practices and culture.
Intermediate Processes in the ITIL Framework
There are some important differences between the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and other frameworks. However, there are at least two core pillars that have stayed consistent between upgrades and iterations. And as you may have guessed already, these pillars include Change Management and Problem Management.
ITIL Change Management
Change Management is a balancing act between the demand for speed and managing the change’s inherent hazards. After all, no company wants its latest change to cause problems for its customers and employees, nor does it like the IT service desk to become overwhelmed with change-related events. The requirement for a change management strategy is based on this unwelcome disturbance and associated cost.
Scheduled, emergency, routine and significant changes are all managed through the change management process. Before executing any new or planned change, change management specifies particular roles and functions, such as who can and how to submit a Request for Change (RFC), who sits on a Change Advisory Board (CAB), and who is responsible for implementing and managing the change.
ITIL Problem Management
Problem management combines with incident management and other ITIL standards to develop an entire ITSM approach. Although problem and incident management are distinct, they are both important ITIL components.
In definition, problems are a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.
Incidents give rise to problems, but incidents do not transform into problems, despite defining them. Instead, repeated incidents establish a new ITSM entity and a separate record in an ITSM program.
A problem could be a recurring event — for example, the same laptop experiencing hard drive issues regularly (despite repeated replacement). Or it could be a multi-laptop occurrence, with the most likely cause, or root cause, being a manufacturing defect.
The analysis of incident logs and other ITSM data commonly gets used to identify problems. Furthermore, issues frequently get handled over a longer period than incidents. Here, data from ITSM tools and maybe other sources of information is gathered and evaluated to figure out what is causing the reoccurring issues and what needs to be fixed.
If a definite remedy is not known or is not practical, then a known error and workaround are developed to flag and fix the reoccurring issue, respectively, temporarily.
For these reasons, Change Management and Problem Management are considered intermediate processes in the ITIL framework.
Conclusion
It is not an easy task to flag and fix the problem and implement a change. Change must get planned for, and execution is only one element in the change management process. After the change has happened, you must perform testing to see if the desired results get obtained. If the modification is not effective, you can utilize remediation procedures to figure out what went wrong and create a backup plan to address the concerns that prompted the request.
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