Change Management (ITSM) - Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Change Management within ITSM (as opposed to software engineering or project management) is often associated with ITIL, but the origins of change as an IT management process predate ITIL considerably, at least according to the IBM publication A Management System for the Information Business.

In the ITIL framework, Change Management is a part of "Service Transition" - transitioning something newly developed (i.e. an update to an existing production environment or deploying something entirely new) from the Service Design phase into Service Operation (AKA Business As Usual) and aims to ensure that standardised methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all changes.

Change Management is a process used for managing the planned deployment of alterations to all configuration items in the configuration management database, (or "CIs" in the CMDB) that are a part of a business's live ("production") and test ("UAT") environments along with any other environment that a business wants to have under Change Management - generally all environments that are under the control of 'ICT Operations'). It is not typically responsible for change within development environments (see below).

A change is an event that is:

• approved by management
• implemented with a minimised and accepted risk to existing IT infrastructure
• results in a new status of one or more configuration items (CIs)
• provides increased value to the business (Increased Revenue, Avoided Cost, or Improved Service) from the use of the new or enhanced IT systems.