Enabling Change in ITIL

Change Enablement is an ITIL practice that aims to maximise the number of successful changes in IT. It consists of ensuring that risks have been appropriately assessed, authorising the progress of changes and managing their scheduling.

This practice constitutes a fundamental pillar in ITIL service management practices.

The Main Characteristics of Change Enablement

• The definition of change according to ITIL, is any modification, addition or removal that may directly or indirectly affect an organisation’s services.
• The scope of this practice is the entire IT infrastructure, applications, documentation, processes, relationships with suppliers and anything else that may directly or indirectly impact a product or service.
• In the description of this practice, a distinction is made between organisational change management practices that are people-oriented, and change enablement practices that are product- and service-oriented. It is necessary to balance the need to implement changes that bring benefits and added value with protecting customers and users from the negative effects of changes.

Putting the Client First in order to Promote Change

Business dynamics and customer expectations are constantly evolving and digital transformation today represents a fundamental pillar for business success across all sectors. This entails adopting changes in the IT domain that enable organisations to integrate new technologies into existing IT processes and activities.

These changes can range from the integration of cloud-based collaborative applications to improve operational efficiency, to adopting a mobile-first approach to enhance the consumer experience. However, such changes involve significant logistical challenges. Incorrect implementation could lead an organisation to take one step forward and two steps back. ITIL defines change management as the process of overseeing and managing a change from start to finish, with the goal of minimising risks.

Establishing a systematic change management process helps organisations successfully implement changes, avoiding incidents and increasing success rates.

Essentially, any modification to the IT infrastructure that affects business operations, such as the replacement of printers, projectors, servers and more, falls into this category of IT change.

Change Enablement: Change Activities, Authority and Planning

Technology evolves rapidly with cloud computing and agile methodologies driven by the increasing demand for digital services. Today, changes occur in seconds, hours and days rather than weeks, months, or years, requiring support systems that align with this rapid pace of change.

In response, ITIL 4 introduced Change Enablement, a practice focused on facilitating and supporting change rather than managing it.

In the Agile/DevOps landscape, risk assessment, change authorisation and managing change timelines become crucial. Effective change management reflects a commitment to delivering value to the customer. While some changes may be straightforward and require minimal impact on other teams and services, others necessitate thorough planning and coordination to mitigate risks and ensure a seamless customer experience.

The priority is to understand the motivations behind the changes and to create simplified mechanisms for their implementation, which include both technical and non-technical changes.

This practice complements other ITIL 4 practices, such as Service Configuration Management and Release Management, to deliver end-to-end services aligned with business needs. By focusing on delivering on-time, minimising negative impacts, ensuring stakeholder satisfaction and meeting governance/compliance requirements, Change Enablement empowers service management professionals to navigate complex stakeholder dynamics and drive change for organisational success.

The 3 Types of Change: Standard, Normal and Emergency

When discussing Change Enablement, three different types of changes are addressed: standard, normal and emergency. Each requires a different type of evaluation and response:

1.Standard changes

• Risk mitigated, with pre-authorised approvals.
• Clearly understood and carefully documented.
• Can be executed without requiring further approvals.
• Operational changes can also begin as service requests.
• When creating or modifying the procedure for a standard change, a full risk assessment and normal approval are required only if the method of implementation is altered.

2. Normal changes

• Must be planned, evaluated and authorised following a standard sequence of activities.
• Change models specify roles responsible for evaluation and authorisation:
  • For low-risk changes, authority for decision-making usually lies with individuals capable of making quick decisions, often supported by automation to speed up the change process.
  • For critical changes, the approval authority should be at the level of the board or an equivalent.
• Changes are triggered by the creation of a Request for Change (RFC), which can occur manually or automatically through automated pipelines in the context of Cloud/DevOps CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery).

3.Emergency changes

• Require immediate implementation, for example, to resolve an incident.
• Regular changes are usually not planned in the agenda.
• The evaluation and authorisation process is accelerated to ensure rapid implementation of such changes.
• Preferably, emergency changes should follow the same process of testing, evaluation and authorisation as regular changes. However, in many cases it is acceptable to postpone updating the documentation until implementation. Sometimes, it will be necessary to implement the change with reduced testing due to time constraints.
• There could be a separate change authority for urgent changes, usually consisting of a small group of senior managers who are aware of the related business risks.

The Difference between an Incident, Problem and Change

It is important not to confuse the three terms incident, problem and change in order to better understand this practice.

1. Incident is defined as an ‘unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service. To overcome it, the service must be restored to normal operation as soon as possible. It is reactive in nature.
2. Problem
   is the cause or possible reason for one or more incidents. If we are faced with a problem, it is necessary to identify the root cause of the interruption in the normal service operations. Its nature is both reactive and proactive.
3. We talk about change whenever there is an addition, modification or removal of anything that may have a direct or indirect effect on services. In order to address a change, it is necessary to implement changes to address the root cause so as to avoid further disruption to the normal service operations.
   The nature of change is both reactive and proactive.

ITIL Change Enablement Training

Professionals can improve their Change Enablement skills through the Change Enablement practice, which provides insights into risk management, dependency mapping, stakeholder management and value-centred collaboration.

After the ITIL Foundation training, IT professionals can continue their journey with the Plan, Implement & Control course.

This is a combined course consisting of practical modules that offer shorter and more flexible training. The course includes the 5 practices:

• Change Enablement
• Release Management
• Service Configuration Management
• Deployment Management
• IT Asset Management

Are you interested to learn more on ITIL? Also read:

• Incident Management in ITIL
• Problem Management in ITIL
• What is Digital Transformation?
• What is ITIL?
• What are Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) in DevOps?

Do you want to learn more about the course? Visit our ITIL Plan, Implement & Control page or contact us!