Business Approval - Who's role?

[changeborg]

This has been our latest battle in the war of change management within our organization. Just to put a reminder out there, we are a global organization located in Europe, North America and APAC (amongst others but these are the big 3). Within the change organization, we have a staff of 2 whom are accountable for all change management operational and governance duties. Obviously this is a tremendous amount of work for 2 people considering we average around 700+ changes per month. The bulk of these changes are minor/low risk changes therefore require little to no involvement of the change team short of closure and any necessary PIR's.

Within 2 of the 3 regions mentioned above, the change owner/implementer is held accountable to obtain all required business approvals and include the approvals on the RFC before it can be approved to proceed. They are very strict with this and rarely ever have any compliance or auditing issues.

With the 3rd region, the owners/implementers believe that this is the role of the change team and flat out refuse to speak with the business due to their misguided belief. The management of the change owners is supportive of their people and will not accept the process as communicated which is leading to mass turmoil and many arguments during CAB meetings.

I'm curious how others out there manage the business approvals and how you have your individual roles mapped out to make it clear to everyone (and how you overcame the pushback from the troops). We simply cannot manage all the approval coordination for 700+ changes monthly between 2 individuals who are required to manage the governance AND operational CM duties.

[Timo]

sounds like a fun situation. To be quite frank, i doubt you will be able to come to some sort of an agreement until some big wig everyone is afraid of will rule one way or another with an iron fist. It's a matter of policy and adherence to it. But if there is no leadership in the area and parties are allowed to point fingers at each other then i am afraid you won't get anywhere. This is my ever so realistic (some may read pessimistic) take on it.

in my experience whenever we've designed change process, we've involved business community to gauge their take on the new expectation of their role in the process. As long as they see they won't be burdened by much extra admin or paper work they were fine with the concept of participating in the approval activities.

automation helps... send approval task, set timer around it, all they have to do is click a button.

best of all, get an ITIL consultant

[changeborg]

Timo - thanks for your input and you're pretty much dead on my line of thinking as well. While we're not looking to bring in a consultant, our biggest issue is personnel which we are just starting to battle.