What is the point of the change management process? What are you trying to accomplish? This doesn’t seem to be articulated anywhere.
Typically you use change management to move the environment from one known state to another – managing risk etc. along the way. 1) Risk management (this includes time of change/duration of change/back out plan/risk of failure) and appropriate acceptance of these risks (e.g. by management etc.) This could be done via email, provided you have proper retention of records, and no real need to do any post-even analysis 2) The movement of the CMDB from old state to new state, so that the CMDB reflects the state of the environment (source of truth) If you just want to do (1), then I guess email would be possible. But if you ever need to understand what changes have been made in the past (e.g. as part of incident), then you either need a CMDB and proper change records, or you need to be able to search everyone’s email. The latter usually isn’t possible. Cheers Ken From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Lum Sent: Wednesday, 29 October 2014 8:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] Change Management process and documentation Thanks for the feedback everyone. Fortunately budgeting isn’t an issue, and we only rolled out this change management process two weeks ago and we’re still refining it. Knowing how momentum works, I’d rather change this now than try to change it six months from now when I’ll hear “how will we being everything over?” and “but everyone is used to this process now…”. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Daniel Chenault Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 10:17 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] Change Management process and documentation We use Salesforce for ticketing which has a change control process within it. I'm guessing budget is limited. Perhaps a PF? On Oct 28, 2014, at 10:11, "Dave Lum" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: We are defining a new change management process at %dayjob%. The current consensus is to do it all via email, which for reason’s I can’t fully explain gives me fits. I’ve been asked why not email and I can’t come up with anything more useful than “new engineer starts and has no way to review previous changes”. Kind of a weak argument… %dayjob% is a smallish company (~250 employees) that does have to worry about HIPAA but currently shows no interest in following ITIL guidelines. What do you guys use and if not email, why not? Dave Lum \\ I.T. Garage [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> \\ 503.267.9764 (voice/text) www.theitgarage.com<http://www.theitgarage.com>
