Change Control Questions

“Who” Questions

•  Who will be affected by the change? Ensure that there is appropriate representation on the CAB to make decisions.
• Who could be affected by the change if it fails?
• Who from the potentially affected group(s) has signed off on the change?
• Who is performing the change (the “change builder”)?
• Who has reviewed the proposed change?
• Who is the project manager if this change involves more than one step?

“What” Questions

• What assets are the targets of the proposed change?
• What is the change timeline?
• What is the change review priority based on the associated risk and urgency?
  • Urgent
  • High
  • Medium
  • Low
• What assets or processes depend on the targeted assets?
• What will the successful change look like when implemented?
• What business processes need to be verified after making the change?
• What is the business or technical reason for the change?
• What will happen if the change is not made?

“When” Questions

• When will the change be performed?
• When will it be finished?
• When will the benefits of the change be realized?

“How” Questions

• How will the change be implemented (in waves, one at a time, etc.)?
• How will we verify success?
• How will issues be escalated?
• How successful were similar changes in the past?  (i.e. change success rate)

“What if” Questions

• What is the back out (rollback) plan if the change should fail for some reason?
• What is the worst possible outcome associated with this change?
• What will the worst case service outage be?

Ron’s IT Operations Golden Rules

1. Protecting the production environment is our number one job.
2. The first part of protecting the environment is protecting the data. Backups are critical. Everything can be interrupted to ensure we get a clean backup.
3. The most important part of your change control is the back-out plan. If it all goes to heck in a handbasket, you can quickly get back to a good state if you have already planned your recovery in advance.
4. There is no such thing as minor change.
5. Nobody is indispensable…but all of the DBAs are forbidden to cross the street at the same time.
6. It’s only money. Don’t let that get in the way of doing what’s right.
7. A policy without compliance and auditing is a wish. As in “I wish they would do what I said.”
8. What gets measured gets improved.
9. You don’t understand the problem until you can express it mathematically.
10. Never say no to a user - just put a price tag on yes.

11 Traits of a True IT Leader

1. Fluency in both technology and the business
2. Ability to work at tactical and strategic levels simultaneously
3. Foresight to connect disparate pieces into cohesive solutions
4. Flexibility
5. Commitment to lifelong learning, with a readiness to stretch beyond core competencies
6. Marketing competence
7. Consummate communication skills
8. Ability to find and manage top talent
9. Vendor management expertise
10. Project management excellence
11. Willingness to delegate

Source: “Ones to Watch”, CIO Magazine, 7/15/2005

Help for the Help Desk

Describe your level of statisfaction with your company’s IT help desk in the following areas?

1. Courtesy
2. Availability
3. Expertise of the help desk
4. Timeliness of updates regarding your issue
5. Availability to resolve requests in a timely manner
6. Availability to resolve requests the first time around

Source: “Help for the Help Desk” , CIO Magazine, 7/15/2005

The Toolkit methodology

Step One: Hunt & Gather

• Interview business customers and stakeholders
• Interview staff. Conduct 1:1s and meet and greets with your organization.
• Interview your boss.

Step Two: Synthesize

• From what you have learned, identify top 5 frequent themes from interviews.
• Communicate themes back in the form of top objectives for your department for consensus.
• Communicate themes to your boss for consensus and alignment.

Step Three: Communicate the Vision

• Use the top 5 themes as your organizational strategies for the department.
• Use the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard to ensure you are covering financial, customer, internal process and people in your strategy.
• Create metrics that would be leading or lagging indicators of how well your department is achieving it’s goals for each of the five strategies. Ensure they are in a BSC perspective so you can look for balance in your scorecard.

Step Four: Operationalizing the Strategy

• Use predefined templates to create a clear understanding of what the definition is of each metric along with it’s actual baseline if known.
• Agree internally within IT first on a end of year target. Use this as a starting point for discussions with stakeholders.
• Produce bi-weekly or monthly scorecard. Ensure each metric has an owner who is responsible for improving performance.
• Approve projects and initiatives that directly support improving the metrics. How will this initiative help us reach our target for the year?
• Allocate resources to projects based on impact to the metrics not based on organizational politics and alignment. Do the right thing not the easy thing!
• Hold Monthly System Quality Meetings with your direct reports to let them know that you are overseeing the progress.