Unified change management helps IT and developers
September 11, 2008 —
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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.
Related Search Term(s): change management, ITIL, professional development, testing & troubleshooting, Pepperweed
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