Unified change management helps IT and developers

By Alex Handy

September 11, 2008 —

To an outsider, it might seem that IT and development folks are cut from the same wood. But those who've worked on either side of this often tall fence know that the lines of communications between those who write the software and those who run the software can often break down without proper processes in place. At the IT Service Management Fusion conference in San Francisco in early September, many of those in attendance were discussing just how to bring IT and development goals closer together.

At the heart of this debate is change management. With both IT and development teams tracking their own schedules for change, it can be difficult to merge the two. But merge they must, said Richard Hawkins, director of IT service management consulting at Pepperweed, a nationwide consulting firm. Hawkins said that he's seen numerous organizations in the field where the developers and the IT managers don't get along.

“There's a large retail chain in the Seattle area [with] about 80 stores across the country. One day, they made an IT change: moving an application into production on the first day of one of the company's two yearly five-day sales. It brought the entire system to its knees, and for four hours they couldn't process any transactions. The business said to IT, 'If you do that again, we outsource all of you.' Since then, they have implemented one of the premier change management systems I've seen,” said Hawkins.

That new system brings change schedules from all sources and treats them like calendar items, he added. When a major software change is in the pipeline, an exact date is set ahead of time for the rollout. The company's Web 2.0-like calendaring and resource planning systems are all aware of this date, and they keep it visible along with meetings, holidays and other company activities. Thus, when change time comes, everyone in the company is ready.

John Collier, Bank of America senior VP of IT strategy and architecture, said that the real danger of change is the unquantifiable factor of the people involved. Collier recently became a Bank of America employee when his former employer, Countrywide, was acquired.

He said that many organizations don't take into account “the emotion of change. Change is, many times, viewed by individuals as a threat to their well-being. Structured organization change management can mitigate some of the uncertainty. Make sure our people change and evolve with the IT services over time. We monitor system availability, but what about people availability? We lose a lot of productivity because people don't know where they fit in in the new structure. IT doesn't have to be so reactive.”

Training and communicating
When that change comes from a software update, Hawkins said that development teams may want to consider a much longer time scale for managing the update. That's because the folks who wrote the software are the ones most qualified to train others in its use.

“How do I need to train the end users? How do I train the operating staff? How am I going to handle that initial 90 days of support?” asked Hawkins. “Can I take some of that development team and move them into production for the first 90 days? That's what I'd call 'best practice.' It's rarely what I see.”

Another area where IT and development teams tend to have a disconnect is in the realm of testing, said Hawkins. “IT does a really good job of unit testing, and typically after unit testing they're throwing it over the fence. Some IT departments do user acceptance testing, but rarely are they doing regression testing. Does it hog all the bandwidth? Does it work on my workstation builds? Those are the kinds of things I run into that are just missing, because it's expensive to do,” said Hawkins.

Collier said that proper architecture can help alleviate some of these risks and questions. He said that the SaaS model is actually beneficial for relieving many of the points of disconnect between IT and the rest of an organization. “Many of the emotions felt by individuals affected by change can be improved through a service oriented model,” said Collier.

That requires proper architecture, however, and a continuing dialog between operations and development. “Your application development crew is typically a separate division or practice within IT,” said Hawkins. “They're separate from operations and infrastructure. During your initial requirements analysis, the operations engineer needs to be at the table so he can give the requirements for how it has to be monitored, how they want batch control run, what level of automation needs to be put into it. That's often overlooked until application development throws it over the fence. It's a cooperative development engagement that has to go on.”

To this end, Hawkins and Pepperweed have placed a series of 21 best practices and diagrams for how workflow should function inside an organization. These are available for free from www.pepperweed.com. Hawkins said that offering these workflows won't hurt his consulting business. The hard part, he said, isn't designing these changes: It's implementing them.

Related Search Term(s): change management, ITIL, professional development, testing & troubleshooting, Pepperweed

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