ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) does work. It works very well and is becoming more and more widely adopted, but does not always work the way that management thinks it works.
The basic premise of ITIL is to put structure and process around the business of running IT. It is a collection of guiding principles which, if appropriately adopted into a company will help run the IT function in a reasonable process-driven fashion. It’s largely common sense, which helps.
However, after lots of experience with all of the different aspects of ITIL I have decided that it doesn’t really work the way management think it does. This is especially relevant to Change Management.
The premise behind Change Management is that technical staff are prevented from making non-Standard changes to the IT systems without prior authorisation from all relevant stakeholders.
Where this falls down is 2 fold.
- The definition of Standard change needs to be very carefully identified, documented and locked-down. It never is, leading to techies making personal decision about what constitutes standard change. This definition is always enthusiastically elastic, until something snaps when it will become frustratingly draconian (for a while).
- The stakeholders rarely understand the nature and true impact and risk of the changes taking place, so the CAB must accept the opinion of the techie (see above). The net result of a Change Advisory Board (CAB) is to authorise the technical staff to make change whilst putting the burden of responsibility for the change onto the management. Not the techie. If the changes goes wrong, then it is fault of the approving manager for not assessing the risk correctly, or for approving the change to take place at the wrong time or in the wrong way. However, the techie gets off scott free in all of this.
As long as the process is followed, we can get away with murder.
Filed under: Management Tagged: cab, change management, failure, itil, problem, standard change Image may be NSFW.
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