7 R's of Change Management: ITIL Service Transition Concept on 7 R's of Change Management

I really wonder what made the authors of ITIL Service Transition book create some concept called 7 Rs of change management!

Of course, they say that this set of questions can be used as a ‘starting point’ . How ever, being a best practice documentation, is it worthwhile to create some concept with an interesting title like this – when the contents are just sample questions? (And even more wierd- create objective type questions in the foundation certification like ‘What does 7Rs of change management represent!)

The high-lighted section called 7Rs of change management says: ” These question must be answered for all changes”. While this is the intention, the attempt could have been to include all the mandatory questions, rather than to include only those which has Rs in the key words!

For example, there are questions in this, like:

‘What is the return required from the change?’ and

‘What are the risks involved in the change?’

Now one wonders, where it the basic question of ‘What is the impact of this change’ (that is why this activity of evaluation is generally called as the impact analysis!) The text in the ITIL book also talk about the impact of changes.

a) Are we supposed to assume that the ‘return’ in the above question contains impact as well? But in that case, a negative impact is not a return that is ‘required‘ from the change.

or

b) Are we considering risks and impacts the same? Can’t agree with that!

Also, the other aspects like cost (though there is a question about resources – since resources start with R!!), are not there in these questions.

The point is – ITIL could have provided a more comprehensive (‘starting point’) list of questions for this, had they resisted the temptation to create some thing jazzy like a nice to hear- 7Rs of change management.

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Vinod Agrasala Says:

I fully agree to the definition of RETURN that you have given.

I don’t know much about PMI, but can’t agree with your statement that impact analysis is not a part of change management in ITIL. One difference to note is PMI will be talking about Project change management (even in that case I believe it should consider impact) – while ITIL is concerned about changes to the Services, service management, infrastructure used by the customer/business.

The change management section of ITIL V3 has these clear statements (just to quote a few lines from the Service transition book – section Change management” :

“To make an appropriate response to all requests for change entails a considered approach to assessment of risk and business continuity, change impact, resource requirements, change authorization and especially to the realizable business benefit.”

“Assess and evaluate the business justification, impact, cost, benefits and risk of changes”
And … the section on 7Rs of change management starts with: “The following questions must be answered for all changes. Without this information, the impact assessment cannot be completed”.

In fact, the whole section and the module on change management keep talking about ‘impact assessment’!

Impact assessment is an important part of Availability and continuity management as well – but was not quite sure about your pick on ‘only problem management’. If you meant the prioritization of Problems based on impact, the same is true in Incident management (and even true for change management where change classification and prioritization considers impact).

Also, I cannot agree that impact is assessed as a part of the risk assessment!

This, for me, goes against the basic difference between Impact and Risk : Impact of some thing is a certain outcome, while Risk is a probable occurance (more often, some thing with a negative effect).

For example: For a requested change of ‘adding one more server to the datacenter cluster’ , the impacts could be:

1. (positive) better application performance and availability
2. (positive) more computing power
3. (negative) additional cost
4. (negative) one more server rack spact and one more network port utilized (unavailable for any other use)

(Here, you can treat 1 & 2 points as RETURN expected from the change – however 3 and 4 have to be classified as IMPACT.)

Change management assesses these impacts to see if it is acceptable to the organization and business, weighing it against the need of the change and benefits.

Now the risks associated with this change could be:

a. While adding this server, the whole cluster may go down
b. The additional server, if not fully tested for compatibility, might affect the overall performance

and so on…

For these ‘Risks’, the change management looks for adequate mitigations.

My basic contention with the ITIL V3′s representation of the concept goes back to the fundamental question: Are the 7 questions ‘collectively exhaustive’ ( or even mutually exclusive – as in MECE principle!) to give a definitive title like that.

Am willing to discuss this further, if you still feel the 7Rs of change management gives an exhaustive (or at least ‘almost’ exhaustive) coverage of the change assessment, for it to deserve such a title.

SOURCE: http://vagrasala.wordpress.com