Change vs Service Transition

[mnsmith]

Hello All

I'm after a little bit of advise on ITIL processes so thought I'd come to my favourite ITIL based forum.

We currently have quite a mature Change Management process and a fledgling Service Transition process for new and updated services. They have both been developed in isolation so they don't sit nicely together.

The problem we've got is that we have a lot of duplicate between the two process because projects need to go through logging, approving and doing a service transition and also need to go through logging, approving and doing a change request. Now that I have ownership of them both, I want to improve the situation.

The main question I've got for the forum is: do change requests spawn service transition activities or does service transition spawn change requests?

I suspect at least one person might say "it depends" so if this is you, can you explain you answer and give examples (that make it sound like an exam question - but it's not).

Thanks

Mick
_________________
Mick Smith
Change, Configuration and Release Manager

[asrilrm]

Hi Mick,

Honestly I'm not sure I clearly understand your question, and it does look like an exam question, sorry.

You said that you have already established a mature Change Management Process, and currently Service Transition to come.
Need to be clear what do you mean by Service Transition? Is it ITIL V3 Service Transition?
If it is, V3 Service Transition (ST) processes are:
- Transition Planning and Support
- Change Management
- Asset and Config Management
- Release and Deployment Management
- Validation and Testing
- Evaluation
- Knowledge Management.

Change Management is one important process in ST.
My question is: are you re-inventing the wheel by creating another Change Management process in the ST besides the one you have already had?

To your question, I know that change management in V3 is a big extension of the one in V2 and involves a lot more aspects, such as organization, culture, etc. It's not easy but I would say that if you want to incorporate V3, you better work on your current change management to make it fit in ST, then use only one change management process.

V3 anyhow groups together V2's Change, Configuration and Release Management into the ST.

Cheers,
Asril