Why Change Management before Configuration Management?
In ITIL, Configuration Management is the process that provides accurate and timely information to other process areas. For Change Management, it provides key relationship and stakeholder information so the Change Manager can assess the potential impacts of changes to the business. With this in mind, some people ask why Visible Ops begins with Change Management first and then doesn’t start Configuration Management until the next phase.
There are basically two reasons we began with Change Management. First, we needed to put a quick end to the unplanned work caused by uncontrolled change. Many organizations without Change Management are running their people at capacity including night and weekend work trying to stay operational by brute force. Not only are they creating a good deal of their unplanned firefighting work through human error, but they are also too busy to work on process improvement. Slogans like “Quality is Job One” are meaningless if people are too busy to do anything. Not to digress too much, but those slogans are useless unless people see management actually putting weight behind the ideas and “walking the walk” not just “talking the talk”.
The second reason is that while configuration data is vital to have, without Change Management, the data will be inaccurate very quickly. Think of it this way, configuration records need to be updated to constantly reflect the production environment. If uncontrolled changes are constantly happening and not everything is being reported, then how can the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) possibly be accurate? Moreover, the less accurate it is, the less people use it which means it becomes even less accurate and the accuracy and value of the configuration data viciously spirals downward. The Catch and Release configuration item inventory in phase two of Visible Ops would render great information but without Change Management, it would quickly become inaccurate and useless.
Thus, the needs to reduce unplanned work in order to have time to work on process improvement efforts and the need to maintain accurate configuration records are the two big reasons we began with Change Management.