Initiating an ITIL compliant change request

The ITIL Change Management best practices are designed to:

• Help an organization respond to constantly evolving business needs while minimizing incidents, disruption and re-performing work
• Respond to an organizations requirements and IT requests for change that will align the services with the business requirements

The ITIL Change Management process attempts to add value by:

• Gathering and prioritizing change requests
• Executing the requests within agreed time
• Enabling the organization to meet governance and regulation change-requirements
• Monitoring changes from the time of request all the way through to deployment into production while understanding affected assets

The ITIL process acknowledges that the success of an organization is dependent on reliability and business continuity.

The Change Advisory Board (CAB) is the key contributor in the ITIL model, as it will act as the change authority within an organization by, evaluating, examining and prioritizing each request for change, then approving and authorizing work.

The key considerations by CAB when evaluating and prioritizing change, should acknowledge the ‘Seven R’s’ of change management:

RAISED/REQUESTOR - Who raised/requested the Change?
REASON - What is the reason for the change?
RETURN - What return will the change provide?
RISKS - What risks are involved with the change?
RESOURCES - What resources will be required to perform this change?
RESPONSIBLE - Who is responsible for this change being performed?
RELATIONSHIP - What relationship are there between this and other changes?

In order for a Rev-Trac change process to be considered ITIL compliant, it should be configured with the following attributes:

• Evidence of Business approval by the CAB - This should be performed prior to any development occurring for the change request in question
• Include a CAB approval status prior to any development status
• Restrictions on when a transport can be created - preventing users from commencing work until the CAB has approved the change
• The CAB status should not allow for transports to be associated with the request, transports should only be allowed after the development has been approved
• Mandatory information gathering - The requestor should provide enough detail for the CAB to evaluate the Seven R’s of change management
• Using request completion rules, enforce the attachment or referencing of supporting documentation

NOTE: In the case of an emergency change, it is common for the CAB considerations to be made after the change has been deployed to production.

For information about the configuration of an ITIL compliant change management process, please contact consulting@xrsc.com

Chris's Bio
Chris Drake is our Software Consultant and Pre-sales Engineer at Revelation Software Concepts. He is in charge of performing Rev-Trac Implementations and Strategic Planning. Joined RSC back in 2007 as part of the support team and assisting in the QA of product release. Chris loves playing sports, driving fast cars, horse racing and good food!

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