Introducing change management to small businesses
This subject is one that either you will immediately click with or will go cold straight away or say “what is the point?” Change management has a simplistic role – reduce the possibility of having a computer system fail following a change to the hardware or software by asking some basic questions BEFORE the change is allowed to happen.
Change management is not responsible for actioning the change (and therefore does not need to be technically skilled in a “hand's on” way), what it does have to do is to make sure that before the change is allowed to go ahead the following questions are considered:
1) What is the change and why are we doing it ?
2) Will the service be disrupted or not available during the time the change is taking place ?
3) How has the change been tested prior to it being implement on your system ?
4) If the change causes a problem, how will the change be rolled back to get your system back to its pre-change state ?
Now all of this sound quite obstructive but consider the following types of changes and ask yourself if you have done any of these recently:
• Added a new piece of hardware such as a printer (which needs a driver loading)
• Upgrade your operating system with a full service pack or security patch downloaded from the website
• Upgraded an application to the next version
• Loaded a new application onto a PC which also runs other systems
Would your responses to these questions have made you approach the change any different?
I would hazard a guess that questions 1 & 2 were quite easy to answer and feel comfortable with. I bet that question 3 prompted a response such as “what test system? we have 5 PC’s which are all different, you mean I have got to have a spare of each one?” Question 4, this is the one I love as most people assume you can just “uninstall it” and your PC ends up as it was before, but the new program leaves fragments behind which even after uninstalling the main program, may give you a problem.
Now with the modern Windows operating system (and I assume most readers of this blog are running windows) the method of installing & un-installing is fairly reliable and tried and tested, likewise, if you have your machine to automatically accept updates from the Microsoft website and allow them to apply themselves on shut down, your visibility of changes in impaired. I actually have one reliable restore point for my laptop – the restore disk that came with it. But that does not include all of my data, ms-office, anti-virus program plus all of the little applications I have loaded to help me along the way. If something did go wrong, I estimate it would take me 12 hours to get my laptop back to a similar state and even then it would not be exactly the same. Am I prepared to take that gamble? Well yes I am, but I take that gamble AFTER answering the four questions and weighing up the risks. Now you may have suppliers that manage your IT for you. If you do, next time they carryout some work ask them the four questions BEFORE you let them loose. Pay particular attention to their reaction and reply to the last two.
In the next chapter of this subject I hope to go into a little more detail of the benefits of change and the rationale behind these questions as well as introducing a basic flow process for managing changes.
If you would like more information about establishing change control in your computer environment, email us requesting "CM1 - Establishing basic change control in a small computer environment"
