become-itil-foundation-certified-abhinav-kaiser(www.ebook-dl.com)

Chapter 6 ■ Service Transition
6.4.1.2 Scope of Change Management
Change management applies to all changes that are performed on the IT services.
But what is the definition of a change? I have provided examples of changes when I
introduced the process. The official definition of what a change is:
Change is the addition, removal, or modification of anything that could
have an effect on IT services.
Yet, the scope is not clear. An IT service can spread far and wide, including
the suppliers who support the service, the IT professionals who manage it, and the
documentation for it. Does changing any of these peripheral components call in a
change? Yes, but it depends on the agreement between the service provider and customer
organization. Managing more items requires more time and resources, which adds up
to expenses. If the customer wants to have absolute control over the IT services, then
yes, every single element that makes up a service must come into the purview of change
management. In the real world, this is often not the case, owing to the financials. Many
of the indirect components are ignored in the interests of reducing expenses, and some
companies find innovative ways of controlling the peripheral objects using standard
changes and service requests.
From my experience, there is much more to change management than addition,
removal, and modification of IT services. Take the example of running an ad hoc
report. You are not adding, removing, or modifying anything, just reading data from the
database. Yet, you possess the power in your hands to break systems with the wrong set
of queries that goes searching in each and every table, that utilizes the infrastructure’s
resources, and could potentially cause performance issues to the IT service. In this case,
if you bring this through to change management, they can possibly identify the resource
consuming queries and shelve them or schedule them to be run during off-peak hours.
To define scope, ITIL takes a holistic approach to define what can be categorized a
change. It scopes changes based on the five aspects of design:
1. New or modified services, where functional requirements are
changing, translating to resources and capabilities
2. Management information systems (reporting and
communication) and tools
3. Technology and management architecture
4. Policies, processes, and components derived from processes,
such as templates, guidelines, etc.
5. Measurement systems, metrics, key performance indicators
(KPIs), and associated methodologies
120