Making Changes for the New Year

Posted January 22nd, 2008 by Joe Pendry

How are you doing on your New Year’s resolutions? If you are like many of us, you aimed too high and right about now you have moved into 2008 without much of a difference in how much you eat, smoke or watch TV when compared to 2007.

Companies (and IT Operations teams in particular) that are trying to do a better job of making changes often find themselves in the same boat. They want to be regimented about how and when changes are made, but they find themselves slipping into bad habits when an emergency happens or when they are getting pressure from above to tweak an application.

Resolutions and change management are similar in this way. Success requires discipline and the ability to understand what can realistically be achieved. If you think you are going to work out every day for the next six months, you are likely setting yourself up for failure.

The folks at Serio and Evergreen have blogged about this in the past – they focus on ways to define the change management process and improve planning in order to bring about better results.

We also recently released some research about change management maturity that shows a seemingly small step like regularly scheduling changes can have strong benefits, including:

20 percent fewer production problems
20 percent fewer IT staff required to for change management activities
23 percent fewer emergency changes
5 percent greater confidence in changes
70 percent more likely to view the change management process as “smooth”

So when should you schedule your changes? As the chart below shows, we found that most companies who schedule regular changes do make them on a weekly basis.

But regardless of when you schedule the changes – weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever – benefits can be realized. Just being disciplined about when you make the changes helps to lower the issues that changes can cause. It is the change management equivalent to taking the stairs instead of the escalator.

One reason that regularly scheduling changes works is that it forces everyone into a standardized process. When dealing with changes, standardized processes are good because they minimize the possibility that someone makes the right change at the wrong time.

So don’t worry that you still seem to find yourself in front of the TV watching American Idol in spite of yourself. Just do a better job of scheduling changes and it will all balance out.