The Only Constant is Change
The adage in the industry is that 50% of all incidents are caused by changes. I am equally certain both that figure is low and that it is anecdotal. So few organizations have the tools or processes in place to identify the change occurring, the infrastructure being impacted, or the relationship to the incident that is caused, that their ability to attribute the cause of incident to change can only be supposition.
Cumbersome Process = Blindness
The reason for this gap is certainly not a lack of tools in the marketplace. Change Management is a very well established process, and tools like ServiceNow have that process designed into their core. The reason that Change Management processes are not adhered to as often as Incident Management processes is that they are often overly cumbersome. The bulk of this burden is created by the approval process.
Engineers by personality want to build and are extremely confident in their own technical skills (rightly so). If you ask them to seek approval for the activities that they perform every day, they will start to hide what is going on. Doing the work should take more time than getting approval for the work.
Standard Change is the Goal: Trust but Verify
The key to easing the burden is to establish the goal of moving major categories of changes for groups to a Standard Change. A Standard Change is recorded, but does not require approval. In an ideal scenario, a significant majority of changes should fall into this category. These represent tasks that a group handles every week and has proven reliability in performing.
However, Standard Change classification is a privilege. It must be earned, and it can be taken away. The granularity of this privilege is to a group for a category of changes. For instance, if 30% a database teams tasks involve a recurring restoration task, that DB Restore should be considered for promotion to Standard Change for that group. If there are subsequent Change Failures in the restoration, that category can be demoted back to Normal Change.
The Metric Manual
Percentage of Changes Requiring Approval, Hours Pending Approval, Change Failure Rate, and Implied Change Failure Rate are all key to managing the process above. The goal for the process is to make sure it is lightweight enough that it is adhered to, stringent enough to force collaboration across groups when necessary, and robust enough to provide the information necessary to quickly remedy any impact. The outputs are visibility, quality built earlier into the process, and speed of change.
Data from One Area Informs Another
Link to ServiceNow’s CMDB to gain a 360 degree view of changes to understand the customers, employees, applications, and infrastructure that are impacted. Surface the linkages with the incidents caused by those changes, and the problems that have helped to resolve them. Don’t wait for perfect data – even the lack of linkages creates the urgency to establish functional best practices across teams. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Predictive Analytics FTW
Use predictive analytics to provide and automated risk rating for the future schedule of changes. Combine the data from external monitoring systems with the ServiceNow’s ITSM modules to identify the infrastructure will cause you problems – days before it does. Diet and exercise are preferable to a quadruple bypass (for most). Don’t worry, we don’t have to let an expensive data scientist wander around your organization to learn about your data models on your dime. We have been in a long romance with the ServiceNow data model and those of the most commonly held applications. Northcraft shows up day 1 with established models.
Northcraft Analytics can Help
Northcraft Analytics has been working with Global 2000 companies, national governments, and large non-profits for over 15 years. If you’re the champion for management by metrics within your organization and have had difficulty gaining traction or maintaining momentum, we can give you a decade’s worth of metrics and visualizations out of the box on the standard Microsoft tools your organization is already familiar with.
There are few strategic projects in any organization that are not fundamentally IT projects, and none that do not involve IT along the way. IT is in the business of performing magic. Use Northcraft Analytics to help you communicate the full story in the language of business.
