ITIL / Change control

Stolly

Stolly

Stolly

Soldato
Joined
11 Mar 2004
Posts
5,000
Got it ?

Love it or hate it ?

I see it as a necessary evil but if you are going to do it you have to do it properly.

This means having implementation and rollback details in the change, and to expect approvers to review the change and not just rubber stamp the thing without even understanding what its about.

Place i'm at now has it in theory, but i'm having "cultural" issues with a team or two who don't seem to see why they can't just muck about in live and just hope for the best, fixing any issues before anybody gets too upset.....
 
Passed foundation and we use a variation on it. As you say its how you use the processes. People need to be accountable for changes and having a rollback plan is a necessity.....
 
I'm responsible for configuration management on a major home office contract. All changes are thoroughly assessed for impact before they even get out there into the change system, all changes tracked with a complete audit/security/config trail, through change, config, release, (problem/incident depending on how they start off). Always a rollback strategy included in all changes we make, code or otherwise.

Because of the nature of the job it'd be commercial suicide to do it any other way!
 
kitten_caboodle said:
I'm responsible for configuration management on a major home office contract. All changes are thoroughly assessed for impact before they even get out there into the change system, all changes tracked with a complete audit/security/config trail, through change, config, release, (problem/incident depending on how they start off). Always a rollback strategy included in all changes we make, code or otherwise.

Because of the nature of the job it'd be commercial suicide to do it any other way!
Click to expand...

My wife supplies this sort of training to the Home Office.
 
We have a major change control set-up working at ours, we are split between US and UK so we need continuity and stability in changes, complimentary updating etc. Not a server or system gets touched (live is a no no, the 2nd level dev/test servers we can play with a little to fine tune our apps) without going through a daily change control conference call which is backed by submitted documentation.. can be a real pain but we know if it isn't done things can go real bad - no-one wants to lose their head because of updating a live server without testing, warning other departments who rely on it or totally screwing up SLA on a service :(

I want to hire someone though to go on the calls for me and write the documentation, I can see how annoyed the police get at having to do paperwork rather than "real" work ;)
 
Masses of change control here ... all work other than basic housekeeping must be covered by change control and this has cover the following sorts of areas:

- Reason for change
- Risk of change
- Security Risk of Change
- Staff involved
- Systems involved
- Outage details on involved systems
- Implementation details
- Reversion details
- Pre implementation testing
- Post implementation testing
- Documentation changes
- Monitoring changes
- Whether access to site is required and if so staff details

Once all of this detail is given then the change has to go infront of the twice weekly change approval board meeting which all interested parties attend, (I represent my team on it usually). If you are not prepared or your documentation is not up to scratch then your change will not be approved. Can get very political, (I may have withheld approval on my own change before now to force action on other work which may have added risk to my changes implementation if it was not sorted out before my implementation date :))

The work I spent most of today implementing had a two page word document which was the standard form for most of the above, a twenty page detailed technical implementation plan, a 6 worksheet spreadsheet giving the timetable for the work, went to change control meetings four times and involved roughly twenty people across the country to implement ... and I wouldn't consider it a particularly large or complicated change.

It can be frustrating but with a good system it does make life easier as you have to think about what you are doing more. I've worked in environments without change control and things can get bad very quickly ...
 
We have taken ITIL one step further from 'Best Practice' to actually maintain an ISO20000 standard.

I'm currently responsible for the Configuration, Capacity and Information Security processes and I think both ITIL v3 and ISO are fantastic frameworks.

It is critical to communicate with all stakeholders when these types of things are being rolled out since everyone must get involved and some people must be held accountable for various activities.
 
Excellent, glad i'm not the only one who believes in change control. I believe its essential when you have distributed teams working on systems.

Now, to make my friends in the other team see sense. They resent change control and take me asking questions as an insult to their competance...
 
OMG.

ITIL and its ilk are designed to give non-engineers jobs in an engineering environment.

When I started working in support we had 8 engineers and one manager. We now have 50 engineers and 15 managers (Change, Problem, Availability, Capacity, CSIP, Incident, Service Support Managers) plus an army of analysts and other hangers-on.

I needed to reboot a switch last week, took three days for loads of 'managers' who weren't technical to give it the ok. The work took 10 minutes. So much for reacting to the needs of the user.
 
Am not involved in the change control side of things but with working in a billing environment for one of the biggest mobile companies in the world, I certainly stumbles across the change lads on a regular basis ;)
 
Had SOCKS in my previous job, hated it, felt so restricted.

But... its good for change tracking and fixing problems, just more paperwork though really.
 
I think that one of the main problems with change management is that the software solutions to implement it are pretty poor, at least the four or five I've come across have been. It would seem that whoever designs them has no idea on how to make an interface that is straight forward and easy to use, (admittedly I do use CA's USD product at the moment which is :(). Most seem to have many options which you do not need and just overly complicate things which puts people off from using them.

Combine that with change managers who have had no training in what they are doing and no experience, (or even in some cases no technical knowledge), and things will not run smoothly and people will resent having to do change control.

I've been lucky that whilst I have had to deal with poor change software I have had some very good change and release managers. This meant as long as you were properly prepared it wasn't problem.
 
Sp00n said:
Had SOCKS in my previous job, hated it, felt so restricted.

But... its good for change tracking and fixing problems, just more paperwork though really.
Click to expand...

Do you mean you were SOCKS compliant? as if you did it is actually SOX as in Sarbanses-Oxley Act which is an American law for standardising and enforcing procedures for the management of public listed companies. Its was a direct result of the likes of the Enron and other scandals which occurred.
 
I'm on a 3 day course with an exam on Day 3 to obtain my Foundation ITIL qualification.

Anyone got any good resources online for me to read to get a bit of a head start?

Cheers,
 
The V3 Foundation is not particularly difficult as long as you keep an open mind and don't forget that it is theory. Learn the theory.

Don't confuse home grown, in house processes with the ITIL processes. Your company may implement Change Management but is it to ITIL standards?

Unfortunately, there aren't many free resources available as ITIL is a proprietry standard - you can buy plenty of books and so on but they can be very pricey.

I wouldn't panic too much on it though, expecially if you already work in a structured Service Management team.
 
ITIL is a framework for common sense, if you pay particular attention to problem and incidents and the difference then you should be alright.
 
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