Conclusion

Strategies

As your organization grows, you will outgrow the principles, methods, and frameworks that you had before. To ensure you sustain that growth and evolve your frameworks over time, you must always pivot your change management around some key strategies of development that you believe in. For us, we focus on these:

• Improving change management must always start with improving your asset management. The better we categorize assets and streamline the processes around them, the stronger our change management structure will become.
• The service desk and change management must be coupled. The better and smoother you couple them, the better your frameworks work. For example, the same set of devices might have a history of services done on them. That history will play a vital role when those devices are involved in change management.
• Focus on automation. From first using emails, we evolved into automating the entire change process for our network devices using scripts. This saves us time and reduces the room for error. We approach all things IT with a focus on speed and accuracy.
• Track every change, especially when it involves manual processes. As we track changes, we learn from them and come up with checklists and guidelines to improve the efficiency of manual processes.

Education

Change management is meant to be the cultural twin of technology. As your company’s technology improves, your change management must improve so your employees embrace it fully. That's where education plays the role of a mentor.

We touched upon the SPA team in this e-book, and we saw its role even more elaborately in our previous books. The SPA team’s role in education is that of a guide—an encyclopedia of all our practices, methods, and ideas. If your organization has to keep up with the ever-improving change management methods, you must ensure you have such a team that is dedicated to being resourceful regarding changes.

Also, this team itself needs education, which is why we chose the SPA team to take up this role. That team faces audits, regulations, security threats, legal obligations, and a host of other challenges that make it aware of the business and the technology side of change.

It passes on this knowledge and conviction to our teams through our communication channels, presentations, collaborative exercises, and a lot more. Our frameworks will stay relevant only if we keep improving them and educating our employees about them.

Sustainability

Sustainability in a change management model is all about revisiting the same question repeatedly: "Why have a change management framework?"

It's tempting to believe we know why it is necessary, but most of us don't get it fully right. Every once in a while, asking this question will get you back on track and even help you improve your framework.

One of the answers is to minimize iterations. It's extremely difficult to get everything right (100% success rate) during the first attempt. Here's where a change management framework helps:

This would also mean that you make minimal mistakes during every step of the process. That's what your framework should focus on.

For your organization, the reason for having a change management framework could be different. But as an IT leader, trying to answer this question will give you a much better perspective. And the answer will help you improve your framework.