Implementing Change Management

at Argonne

June 1, 2009 NLIT 2009, Knoxville, TN

Paul DomagalaArgonne National Laboratory

Why formalized Change Management?

• ITIL• Strategic, value-based approach• A couple of processes at a time• Argonne’s first cut – Incident, Problem, Change

• The ISO 9001 connection

• But really……• It’s 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)

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Gartner

The Process…..

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The Process…..

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Planning & execution

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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@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.

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 that’s 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 (CFS’s)

• Management buy-in, commitment and participation• People/skills

•Process leaders•PM•SME’s•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 isn’t the point!• get people to think through their changes• discuss their changes• be aware of changes

• Make adoption easy

• Facilitate, don’t impede

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Credits

Change ManagersPaul Domagala

Jim Dust

Change Advisory Board (CAB)Donna KetoRoss Pallan

Scott PinkertonDavid SalbegoDave SkelleyMike SkwarekDana StasiakRon Fierro

Databases and Footprints DevFran Carnaghie

Yan LiSarah Fern

Stakeholders and Contributors Nick Stoops Mike Rios

Chris Coglianese  Karl Schmidt Chris Poetzel

   Dave Lehman       Ray Carlson

 Joe Keslin  Dana Stasiak

 Christiaan Zaluzec  Matt Knor

  Brian Sebby Fran Carnaghi

      Gene Rackow Gary Schlesselmann

  Brian Finley  Corey Hall

  Kevin Hayden