It’s that time of year where we are looking
forward to the change management holiday downtime, or are we? Depending on the
rules around the brownout (or blackout) you may find that there are additional
complications associated with them. Here are a few:
No
formalized outage window
Depending on your organization you may have an unspoken
understanding that people are away from the office and that changes simply aren’t
done. The risk here is that without some governance over this “agreement” you
may run into issues with your business units looking to take advantage of
resources who seem to be more free time and asking them to just put in this “little”
change. As we all know this lends itself to problems of its own, as little
change have a way of doing from time to time. If there are complications there
may not be the usual support resource pool to utilize for example which could
impact your business more significantly that if this change was moved out to
another date.
The pre
window flood
In the event that your organization normally
has high levels of operational changes, you may find that depending on the
brownout window duration, you will have a larger volume of changes that need to
be put in before the brownout begins. It is important to outline the
expectations for the window as early as possible so that you are able to have
more lead time to stretch the larger number of changes in over a shorter than
usual timespan. If you don’t the risk you run is having a pile of changes which
may collide the week before the brownout for example. This may cloud the ability
to investigate issues should an incident appear with more changes which could
be the culprit.
The
post window flood
I have found that January can be a month with
more than its fair share of changes primarily because of brownout windows. Some
teams may push out implementations until the next change (or release) window
and there may either be more changes in volume, or larger changes in scope.
This can also complicate the ability to have successful deployments if it is
not closely monitored.
Exceptions
to the rule
Overall you will need to build in some
flexibility to your windows since things still could break, and some projects
which have high business impact are still pushing forward. Ensure that all
teams are aware of the rules. Also allow for changes that no one even
considered. There may be a need to do some change which does not fit nicely
into one of the boxes above. Ensure that extra approval signoff is required to
make sure that implementers understand the added risk of putting a change
through during this outage timeframe.
The best plan is to communicate and work with
your teams to ensure that you can regulate the flow of changes over the holiday
season as well as ensuring that your business continues to experience the
exceptional level of service it is accustomed to.
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Labels: Change Management, ITIL, ITSM