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Change Management>>
Progressing from reaction to unanticipated change to full change managment through a series of selected initiatives.

IT Support Development>>
Achieving best practices without disrupting day-to-day support levels by carefully managing service upgrades.

Service Management Roadmap>>
Delivering high service levels utilizing existing tools and resources and through selected development of new processes.

Service Management Implementation>>
Bringing organizations to a high level of change and service management through the highly successful ITIL® framework.

Service Desk Implementation>>
Extensive experience in Service Desk assessment, roadmap creation, and implementation.

Environment

Continuous growth of the client has put a tremendous burden on its information technology infrastructure.  Numerous systems, supporting hundreds of applications with multiple types of databases over multiple operating systems, have been deployed in a decentralized manner.

This combination of growing complexity, non-centralized system management, disparate and inefficient processes and systems, and a lack of automated management tools, has made maintenance of business continuity a laborious task. 

Background

The IT Support and Infrastructure organization of the client has undergone significant change that began in July of 2001.  Several key initiatives were launched within the technical divisions that spanned several operational areas:
  • Trouble ticketing tool deployed to all IT staff
  • Consolidation of systems management tools into a single Network Operations Center
  • Project Management Office creation and automation
  • Code Migration process development and automation
  • Enterprise Configuration Management inventory and automation

The Business Challenge

The challenge presented was how to implement tactical solutions leveraging existing tools and processes that would evolve into a strategic direction that represented ‘Best Practices’.  All of these changes had a significant impact on staff, budgets, existing tools, and processes.  New processes meant updated automation, and new automation meant defining new processes.  In addition, each of these initiatives integrated both functionally and technically with one another as well as other existing processes and tools.  Considerations posed by the client’s management included the following:
  • What are the business goals for these initiatives?
  • With multiple initiatives and limited resources, how should they be prioritized?
  • How will these initiatives impact one another?
  • What other operations areas will be affected by this work?
  • What are the ‘best practices’ in each area?
  • Will other processes impact the success of these initiatives?

The Business Solution

Approach

We developed a pragmatic plan of implementing these initiatives by leveraging established operations functions and continuously developing functions that integrate with them.  This ‘operations leveling’ process ensures initiatives match the organization’s capacity for change and capabilities.

Research

  • Identify current state of key operations processes
  • Determine the scope, approach, and impact of existing ‘internal improvement’ projects
  • Understand current systems and processes that would be impacted

Analysis

  • Align current projects into a client-specific operations framework
  • Define gaps and develop prioritized initiatives
  • Define what new processes and organizational changes would be needed
  • Define end-state goals for each operations area
  • Define integration points between initiatives and processes

Implementation

  • Leverage or enhance existing tools where possible
  • Implement new tools by replacing existing functionality prior to full automation
  • Continuously identify integration gaps between initiatives and address solutions
  • Maintain tactical and strategic goals throughout the implementations

Change Management Solution: Components

Change Management Roadmap

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Disparate change management methods throughout organization
  • Business rules for release and maintenance windows not standardized
  • Numerous independent initiatives working to improve methods
  • Undefined goals for change management   

The Change Strategy was meant to assess the effectiveness of existing ‘Change Management’ initiatives and their strategic direction in the next nine months.  It defined the planned migration of current initiatives to future goals within a timeline. 

It included all automation tools currently in use and their eventual consolidation into an automated workflow platform.  Business rules, oversight committees, and standard process were also addressed.

Release Coordination Process

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Unconfirmed completion of all development and QA tasks
  • Non-standard software distribution and installation processes
  • Undefined requirements for maintenance and support procedures per release
  • No owner of release management and control
  • Non-standard training of support staff and end-users per release

The intent of this initiative is to define a standard process where all technical teams define their requirements for deploying and supporting changes to the production environment. 

In addition, these teams are responsible for a checklist which outlines the tasks they require for this process.  This process and templates can then be used by all teams to prepare them for Change Control committee approval and improve production deployments.

 

Production Change Database

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Release requests not automated or centralized
  • Difficult to determine if current incidents were caused by recent production changes
  • Release information inaccurate, incomplete, or not captured at all
  • Difficult to quantify volume of changes occurring in production

This database was an existing tool that was seldom used or ineffectively managed by technical staff.  It became the foundation of Change Management efforts once improvements were defined. 

Functional changes were requested to incorporate business rules, repeating installs/events and affiliate locations.  In addition, the Lotus Notes database data was modeled after a common workflow structure with the intent that it would be converted to an enterprise worklfow platform in the future.

 

Change Control Board

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Coordination between dependent teams to execute a production change
  • Collecting required data to execute the change
  • Approving and scheduling concurrent or conflicting changes
  • Tracking execution of release progress
  • Communication of impact to affected parties
  • Updating information systems and documents
  • Verifying change success or failure

This involved the development of a single Change Control committee whose goal it is to coordinate all changes affecting production systems weekly.  The committee reviews change notices submitted by technical teams into a Request Database each week for approval, communication and scheduling. 

This initiative defined the committee, roles, standard processes, communication plans, and development roadmap.

 

Configuration Management Roadmap

     Business Problems     Initiative Summary
  • Hardware and software assets are not identified in a single repository
  • Application architectures are not mapped to infrastructure components they process upon
  • License tracking of installed application not managed effectively
  • Applications are purchased and installed without technical ownership

The scope of this work was to interview IT Support and Infrastructure teams and other appropriate staff.  We identified all current configuration management tools and additional requirements from technical teams. 

Based on the research we developed a roadmap for building a new configuration management tool that leveraged existing client tools, provided additional information requirements, and integrated with change management requirements.