Using ITIL ONLY for Change Management?

[cerven]

I know ITIL is used for:

Configuration Management
Incident Management
Problem Management
Change Management
Service/Help Desk
Release Management

I would like to implement a structured change management system in my organization. Can I utilize ITIL for only change management, or does it require all aspects of my IT organization utilize ITIL for it to work?

I know the toolkit is only a few $Hundred, but I don't want to buy it if it's all or nothing at this point.

Thank You!

[matrix0]

It depends entirely what you want Cerven. If you just want to state that you are ITIL compliant or similar then you would obviously need to address all the disciplines.

However if you simply wanted to cover Change Management, there is nothing wrong with that. Yes, I'm sure you would get value from it (and may look to extend the practices later). However, in terms of any statement you would have to be specific.

I think it's important to understand that the methods and approaches described by ITIL are intended to bring value to the organization that uses them. The SCOPE though is down entirely to the requirements of that organization.

I'm sure there are plenty of organizations that initially applied ITIL to a small defined area, and extended it later. Or maybe like you suggest, took a specific discipline from ITIL and moved on to others later.

In many respects this is a sensible approach, but I'd suggest being clear with your objectives.

[cerven]

Thank you for your reply.

We are a medium sized company ($700Million/year) with an amazingly small IT department consisting of about 11 developers (4 E-Commerce, 5 ERP, 2 CRM) plus support staff.

We have been handling change management through different processes for each development group, but more and more our systems are becoming intertwined and change management is becoming more involved. We need a process that will work for all of our programming groups without the whole being equal to or greater than the sum of its parts; ie change request forms and documentation that works for all 3 groups yet takes 3 times as long to complete.

I was hoping to structure change management first to see if conforming to the ideas of ITIL are more benefit than burden before spreading it to other aspects of our IT organization.

In the past our efforts at imposing a structured change management system have failed because the process introduced more administrative burden than benefit. The person in charge of designing the process, however, was way over-the-top and a 3 minute fix would take 10-20 minutes to document. I'm hoping ITIL has the flexibility to scale to fit our organization, allowing us to develop a structured process without adding unneeded complexity. If the process worked for our change management, we'd take the lessons learned and start using it in other areas.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback! I think I'm going to start down this road and see where it leads.