Are You One of the "Unfortunate Middle"?

Today’s blog entry is all about C H A N G E. Change is dominating the headlines. Change is on everyone’s radar screen. Change is driving our decision-making. And if you’re one of the ‘unfortunate middle’, change is certainly a major issue in your life.

Despite this being a year of wild and wacky Presidential politics, this blog is NOT referring to the “change” that our presidential candidates are embracing. Sorry political junkies, but herein lie no elephants, donkeys, or discussions about the plight of the American middle class (unfortunate or otherwise). However, if you’re an IT professional struggling with production infrastructure change, read on.

As we’ve explained previously, change always concerns IT professionals because of the impact that changes have on downtime and service outages. Our latest report demonstrates that organizational testing maturity can explain much about why change management is a problem for some but not others. The ‘unfortunate middle’ mentioned above represents one of the IT Operations groups introduced by our latest research report, “IT Ops Research Report: Testing Maturity”. This report, produced by Research Edge of Portland, OR, compiles insights from over 400 enterprise IT operational decision-makers regarding the challenge of managing changes to highly-complex, interdependent production infrastructures. This report also identifies criteria to help you determine your Test Maturity Rating.

The research shows that inadequate pre-production testing of changes is a top cause of production delays, errors, and downtime. Over 25% of production changes are implemented without testing of any kind, and even “tested” changes can be problematic, as the majority are not proven against the entire infrastructure stack. Resolving these challenges varies widely from industry to industry and even company by company, but there are ways to determine where you stand in the testing hierarchy. Our new Testing Maturity Rating measures the significant variability in different approaches to pre-production testing, helping you understand the specific areas of change management where your organization can improve.

So how does your organization rate in regard to Test Maturity?

Do you process a lot of changes? Do you have a real staging/testing environment and not just a collection of back-up servers? Are your testing methods comprehensive and proven against the entire stack?

These, and other criteria in our latest report will help you answer the question of whether you’re a Test Leader, a Testing Neophyte, or… a member of the Unfortunate Middle.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations Research, Testing