Demarcation between Incident Mgt & Change Mgt

[JAL]

Something which has had me thinking is the line between when is a change required as part of an incident fix.

There have been many different views on this ranging from:

Any creation, amendment, deletion to a CI as a result of an incident requires an RFC (Retro)

Only when the activity being driven to resolve an incident puts the wider service picture at risk

etc.

Anyone have any expereince of this, bearing in mind the volumes we are talking about there are in the 100's pcm.

[UKVIKING]

JAL,

Statement #1 is IT Depends
Statement #2 - Incident mgmt is the restoration of normal service when normal service has been interrupted
Statement #3 - Change mgmt is the management / control of implementing changes to an environment

If there is a change that is needed to restore service, then an retro change (emergency) process has to be followed.

This is straight from ITIL.

The devil is in the detail

What is being changed, how it is being changed and what controls / audit capabilities are in place. Also whether Change Mgmt has the area under scope of CM

If you have 100s of incidents that require changes, then you have a bigger problem than IT SM - Incident & Change Management

Addenda

If the server, service is being rebooted or restarted to restore service, this is not a change.

If for example, the fault is because a job - scheduled program - had not started when it should and the program is scheduled to run every 1/2 hour, and the change of the schedule is to once an hour. That may be a change or a standard business process. You are not changing the program - just the scheduling of it. If this can bey done by the production support staff with the relevant rights, then this is business as usual.

If there is system setting / configuration setting that has to be configured or changed, then yes, this may be a change - it depends on the scope of CM

Same applies to changing data. Some companies have no Change control on data; others do.

IT DEPENDS

If you can give a few example types, I can give my 1.3267 pence (2 cents).
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter