Change Management: Measure

Periodic reports of the Changes made to the IT infrastructure should be provided to the Change Managers and the senior management so they can observe the progress of the Change Management implementation.

It’s likely different management level will require different levels of information. For example, CIOs may require a quarterly high-level overview of the number of changes made vs. the number of unauthorized changes made. Service managers may require detailed weekly reports listing the individual changes made and the status of the change. Log Intelligence reports can be produced to:

  • Identify changes made to network device and system configurations
  • Determine whether a large number of changes have been made to a configuration item
  • Confirm all changes made are either standard changes or have been approved by the Change Advisory Board (CAB)

Furthermore, results from these reports can be correlated with reports from Incident Management or Problem Management to:

  • Understand how the Change Requests affect the number of incidents or problems
  • Confirm that by following formal change management processes, service quality has indeed improved (e.g., less failures or less back-outs)
  • Determine whether the number of incidents have decreased, leading to fewer problems and additional change requests
  • Demonstrate that implementing change management process has reduced disruption over time