8.4. Benefits, costs and possible problems

8.4.1 Benefits

Efficient service management requires an ability to change things in an orderly way, without making errors and taking wrong decisions. Effective Change Management is indispensable to the satisfactory provision of services, and requires an ability to absorb a high level of Change.

Specific benefits of an effective Change Management system include:

• better alignment of IT services to business requirements
• increased visibility and communication of Changes to both business and service-support staff
• improved risk assessment
• a reduced adverse impact of Changes on the quality of services and on SLAs
• better assessment of the cost of proposed Changes before they are incurred
• fewer Changes that have to be backed-out, along with an increased ability to do this more easily when necessary
• improved Problem and Availability Management through the use of valuable management information relating to changes accumulated through the Change Management process
• increased productivity of Users - through less disruption and, higher-quality services
• increased productivity of key personnel through less need for diversion from planned duties to implement urgent Changes or back-out erroneous Changes
• greater ability to absorb a large volume of Changes
• an enhanced business perception of IT through an improved quality of service and a professional approach.

8.4.2 Costs

The two principal costs of Change Management are for staff and software tools support.

Staff costs

Staff costs include costs for the Change Management role and team, CAB members, and Change builders, including Configuration and Release Management. These costs should of course be outweighed by the benefits that are, or will be, gained. In practice, most organisations already have a number of people who are spending time on handling Changes.

Although adherence to the guidance in this chapter may appear to increase the amount of management time spent on Changes, in practice you will find that management will spend less time on Changes as the need to handle issues arising from ineffective Change Management is eliminated.

Support tools

The cost of support tools, together with any hardware requirements, needs to be considered. Although tools that integrate support for Change Management, Configuration Management, Problem Management and Service Desks are likely to be more expensive than 'simple' Change Management tools, the additional cost is often justifiable. For larger organisations, management processes can be virtually impossible to implement effectively without adequate support tools.

8.4.3 Possible problems

The Change Management process that you implement should be appropriate to the size of your organisation; an over-bureaucratic process can diminish your effectiveness. Paper-based systems (often found in very small organisations or organisations establishing Change Management for the first time) are difficult to administer and often result in bottlenecks; they are really only practical for very small organisations.

There may be cultural difficulties in getting staff, Customers and Users to accept that a single Change Management system should be used for all aspects of an infrastructure. It may require education to convince everyone that all components of an infrastructure can, and very often do, impact heavily upon each other, and that Changes to individual CIs require coordination. Attempts may be made to implement Changes without reference to the Change Management process. Measures should be introduced to prevent and detect such illicit changes, including:

• conducting regular independent audits to check that Change Management staff, other Service Management staff and Users are adhering to the Change Management procedures
• instituting management controls over the activities of in-house and contractors' support staff, and engineers
• implementing Configuration Management control of all CIs and versions
• detecting User access to equipment or software that is unknown to the Configuration Management system via the Service Desk
• training new and existing staff in IT Service Management.

The BSI publication A Code of Practice for IT Service Management - PD0005 - also lists points to consider as possible problems. Clearly addressing these points will transform the problems into benefits.