Moving from ignorant anarchy to informed anarchy:

Despite being a few years old I still felt that this paper, written by Ken Dietel still offered an interesting insight into the process of implementing a change management system into a large organization. The problem being faced was introduced as “ignorant anarchy” with each group in the organization effectively operating independently of each other. New systems would be released into the production environment by system developers without notifying the helpdesk of any changes. When users complained to the helpdesk that a system was operating strangely, the help desk operator would research the situation, find no record of the indicated issue and file a report with the system developers. The system developers would then get back to the help desk and tell them that the system had been changed and what they were seeing was perfectly normal for this new system. 

The author then goes on to describe how management responded to this issue by creating a new job position to carry out the task of implementing the new change management process and then forming a process improvement team, to oversee any new changes.

The next step outlined was the process definition. It described how the process improvement team created a standard change management process flow and its associated procedures and paths that changes followed dependant on their urgency. He then steps through the remaining steps in the approval of a new process including submission of the request change, Approval of the request, review of the request, notification of pending change, implementation and then release of the new process.

What I found interesting about this is that initially the reps from the various IT support groups were reluctant to attend change review meetings as they considered it to be keeping them from their “real work” However I would suggest that attending these meetings may actually improve their workload as they are preventing change related problems from occurring in the first place. Overall I found this paper to be short and to the point and a good overview of implementing a change management process into an IT organization.