Change. It’s something we all deal with every day, whether we want to or not.
In an IT environment, change can either be planned or unplanned. Unplanned can include things like crashed servers, failed hard drives, or data corruption. Planned includes things like upgrades and reboots.
Downtime for either planned or unplanned changes can be costly and disastrous if not handled properly. That makes change control a hot topic throughout industry. If handled poorly, the red tape and cumbersome controls can impact everyone in the organization. If handled properly, it can make everything run smoothly.
Whether your company is large or small, a change policy can benefit you in many ways.
- Plan The Change
Like all aspects of IT, the more you plan, the more controlled risk you will have. This means taking into account every change you incur throughout the year. Develop written guidelines that speak to how everything is done in your organization. Leave nothing to chance. How will things be executed? By whom? What could go wrong? What will the impact be on the systems and our organization?
Questions lead to answers. And it’s the answers that can help you define your detailed plan. The less you leave to chance, the more beneficial your plan will be. It takes more than rebooting or bringing systems back up in some cases. It also means verifying that success is in place.
- Test The Process
In some environments, you can test change before it's implemented. This gives you a chance to find adverse change effects and resolve them before they go live. In other cases, some change cannot be tested, and you have to be more cognizant of potential problems along the way.
There’s never a good time for downtime. But there are timeframes when problems are less impactful and less stressful. This is why changes are often performed during the middle of the night, or on specific days of the week when impact is low.
- Establish Proper Procedures
Along the way, you find certain things that work, and other things that impact your business environment in a big way. This gives you insight on where change is acceptable and where you can reduce your exposure. This is where systems come into play. This is how you learn the difference between low and high priorities and how to approach each. This establishes timeframes of when you’ll least impact the work environment.
- Assign Responsibilities
If your change controls involve staff from different departments, determine who is responsible for each part of the process. Establish guidelines based on departments and who in each area will perform which tasks. This may include testing the results of the change, implementation, or troubleshooting.
- Document The Change
Some things occur more frequently than others. But if you’ve ever scratched your head and wondered “How’d I do that?”, you know the importance of documenting every process you take on. The more you write up, the better you’ll handle other similar changes down the road. Include the plan, verification steps, backout strategies, testing results, time windows, assigned staff. The more you document, the greater chance you’ll have of duplicating the results should this process ever need repeating.
- Establish Both Review and Approval
Changes should never be handled by one person. The more set of eyes you have in the process, the greater the potential for success as an outcome. Have peers and managers alike verify results, analyze data, determine potential pitfalls, and look for opportunities to make the system better. Be sure to get signatures along the way to ensure everyone takes to heart the process being used. This may seem counterintuitive to have lesser experienced people sign off on IT issues, but it can be an added layer of protection if something goes wrong.
- Evaluate
Whether a change is a success or it fails miserably, every step of the process should be evaluated for its outcome. Once a situation is resolved, determine what happened and what steps were performed to reach a conclusion. Was the plan successful or faulty? What unexpected events were a part of the process? What would you do differently if you approached the change again?
Change is inevitable. But in the IT world, the better prepared you are for both the inevitable and the surprises, the less stress you’ll have from top to bottom.
For IT Strategy, Cloud Conversion, or Help Desk Services reach out to us at Silver Linings Technology 360-450-4759.
