Change management has never been easy for the dev or the ops side of the house. Let’s face it; it’s usually a checklist item and a tool to CYA. However, we are moving to a world where change is a part of the culture and a frequent process. There is no excuse to not improve.

The ultimate goal of change management is to drive organizational results and outcomes by engaging the staff to encourage the adoption of a new way to work. Whether it is a process, system, job role, or organizational structure change (potentially…all of the above), a project can only successful if the individual changes daily behaviors and begins doing the job in a new way. This is the nature of change management.

Therefore, staffing a change management board with a crew of change-adverse individuals will get you nowhere.

Often we look at change management as a way to spot problems after they happen. Thus it becomes a tool for responding to change, instead of leveraging change. In this world of DevOps that embraces change as a mechanism to iteratively improve on processes, change management is usually viewed as a blocker to avoid. But in most enterprises and verticals, it cannot be avoided.

Often we look at change management as a way to spot problems afterthey happen. Thus it becomes a tool for responding to change, instead of leveraging change.

In this world of DevOps that embraces change as a mechanism to iteratively improve on processes, change management is usually viewed as a blocker to avoid. But in most enterprises and verticals, it cannot be avoided.

Tooling and implementation can be detached from governance. This decoupling can result in lost communication and a reactive philosophy. Instead consider funneling all changes through the same channel so that nothing gets lost and the change advisory board (CAB) considers all changes. Begin by consolidating change, problem, and incident management into a modular platform that is a part of your DevOps tooling that can streamline everything into one pipeline.

This may seem outlandish at first, but by integrating change into pipelines automates the capture of change records with a set of artifacts. The goal is to ultimately improve collaboration and to build an auditable history.

Companies often establish different modes of change to balance speed, quality, and risk. Consider automating the approval gate for some modes of change. This speeds change processing and increases adoption. This shares the responsibility of effectively making change happen back on to those individuals who conduct the implementations.

Change management should be a priority and used as a single source of truth of all changes. Doing so will increase visibility for risk and compliance management.

We can distill this down to three key ideas to assist in implement efficient change management:

• Do not decide a new direction and then dump it on your team. Involve them in the decision-making process.
• Make work visible to all.
• Embrace value stream mapping to find new ways to increase efficiency.

The bottom line is to be proactive about how change is managed.