Implementing Change Management at Argonne

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Implementing Change Management at Argonne
Paul Domagala Argonne National Laboratory

• June 1, 2009 NLIT 2009, Knoxville, TN

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Why formalized Change Management?

• ITIL
• Strategic, value-based approach
• A couple of processes at a time
• Argonnes first cut Incident, Problem, Change
• The ISO 9001 connection
• But really
• Its not about any of that

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• ..an average of 80 percent of mission-critical
  application service downtime is directly caused
  by people or process failures
• (unmanaged change)

Gartner
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The Process..
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The Process..
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Planning execution

• Treat it like a project
• Define the objectives scope
• Define timeline
• Define roles responsibilities
• Allocate resources
• Break it into manageable pieces
• Process definition
• Phase I pilot - process shakedown
• training communication
• Phase II pilot tune process
• Phase III tool implementation limited
  production
• training communication
• Phase IV production process
• training Communication
• Phase N Improve
• Dont expect to get everything right the first
  time

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Charter

• The goals of the CIS change management process
  are
• repeatable, well thought out change throughout
  the organization
• minimize disruption to services
• transparency communication
• efficient and effective delivery of IT services
  to the laboratory community
• a process that is not an impediment to adoption
• The Change Manager (CM) and Change Advisory Board
  (CAB) are responsible for guiding proposed
  changes through the process and communicating
  relevant information to all stakeholders.
  Specifically, the Change Manager is the owner of
  this process and has primary responsibility for
  the integrity of the process. The Change Advisory
  Board is composed of technical representatives
  and subject matter experts from all functional
  areas of IT operations. The CAB involves
  stakeholders, clients, users and management as
  appropriate.

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Planning
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1. Emergency - If you have a problem that
requires changes to be made to correct a
service-down situation, do whatever's necessary
to correct the situation, stabilize the service
and notify cab-core_at_anl.gov. 2. Urgent -
Urgent requests are changes requiring immediate
consideration. These requests bypass the full CAB
vote and may be approved by a change manager.
Typical approval time for urgent requests is
hours at most. Urgent status is reserved for
changes of a business, security, or
safety-critical nature. 3. Standard - Standard
requests have high, medium or low priority and no
recurrence. Standard requests are approved or
disapproved within 24hrs. 4. Recurring - By
requesting recurring approval status of an RFC,
the requester may receive approval for all
occurrences of the same activities going forward.
Change implementers must still submit a child RFC
of the original so that each occurrence of the
approved RFC can be recorded.
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Pilot

• Limited set of production services
• SAN and related components
• production databases
• power/datacenter (UPS and Commercial)
• Exchange
• domain controllers
• core networking Infrastructure
• New application deployments
• Services Added voluntarily
• LAMP Farm, LDAP, SVN and Trac, Wiki, Zimbra
• Exercise and tuned process

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Tool Implementation
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Some of the info thats important
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Application to major maintenance windows
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Feedback mechanisms
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Take-Aways
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Critical Factors for Success (CFSs)

• Management buy-in, commitment and participation
• People/skills
• Process leaders
• PM
• SMEs
• Customer stakeholder input
• Organizational buy-in
• Adequate resources
• Communication, communication, communication

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• Process before tool
• Start small concentrate on process workflow
• Beware of scope creep (target what actually
  matters)
• Leverage automated workflow to avoid wasting time
• Put timers on stuff
• Crowd-source
• The formalism isnt the point!
• get people to think through their changes
• discuss their changes
• be aware of changes
• Make adoption easy
• Facilitate, dont impede

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