number of changes before change management

[Fang]

I'm developing a Change Management process from scratch covering all ICT services across 2 scientific laboratories (and other outstations), with a disparate set of users, some staff, some visitors. I've just been asked to undertake a "Change Capture Review" in order to find out how many changes happen now. We could then compare this against the number of changes put through our process, discovering how many are evading the process.

Does anyone have any tips on how I could best go about this? There is no central logging of changes across our sites.

[Diarmid]

It can only be done if all changes are already being recorded as changes. And that is extremely unlikely. It would almost certainly be a total waste of time to hunt out "changes" and think you were somehow getting the full picture.

If you are starting from scratch, then you are ignoring how things are done at present. It is untrue that there is no change management already. What may be true is that there is no formal change management in place. Perhaps changes are managed ad hoc by whoever is involved. They even be mostly managed rather well (if they were being constantly managed very badly, then your systems would not be working by now).

If you want to design a change management process where no formal one exists then start with:

- what happens now
- determine objectives and policies
- derive the principles
- get understanding and acceptance up to here
- identify where responsibilities, authority and roles need to be
- then begin to develop procedures

The simple act of getting people to understand explicitly what is important in managing changes could see improvements (probably not easily measureable) in how changes are managed even before you get the formal system in place.

So don't bother with the impossible "how many changes are done", rather focus on how changes are done.

Once you are up and running any change not properly managed is a non-conformance and, if it is deliberate, it could also be a disciplinary matter.
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[Fang]

Thank you for your response --what you have said squares with what I am trying to achieve. You are perfectly correct saying that there must be change management here already --and I have spent the last 5 months since I was recruited seeking out what already exists and asking my peers what they want to see put in place.

I plan to build on what good practice we already have and have just today finished a requirements document based on my discussions with users and service desk etc.

But my line manager (newly returned from 10 months leave) insists on this change capture review – and as I’m not an ITIL person at all, I thought I’d ask in this forum, just in case it was a normal practice!

[Fsneddon]

Another thought, perhaps you can contact each Service/Product/Program Manager and ask them directly, how many changes do they implement each month on average.

If there is no discovery type tool or versioning type tool for each system, this might be the quickest way to find out the average number of tickets created each month.