Service Management Journey: Change Management and the “Gencies”

In addition to the volume of normal or standard changes your organization requires to have completed you will also have to manage the way that escalated changes are managed. While the above mentioned change types have a consistent way that they are generated there will always be exceptions. An example of this will be the definition of what makes an emergency change and what is simply urgent. In reality each have their own place. Like 2 brothers they may be related but certainly they are not the same.

Ur, the younger brother has a tendency to be a bit impatient. You might find him looking at his wrist, even if there is no watch, or tapping his feet. He has an ingrained need to make everything a priority 1 despite whatever is going in around him and despite any other activity priority.

While Emer, the older brother likes to take over when things go a bit outside the lines. Comfortable in chaos, he likes to get all the moving parts back in line and things working again.

Both brothers like to get things moving as quickly as possible and can work well with teams. But as in life we must ensure that we are moving forward with the right amount of due diligence to ensure that there are no additional issues. This is why we need to clearly define the difference between the two, because much like a parent you won't choose one over the other but will need to manage them just a bit differently.

As changes come in, depending on your service management system, you will need to filter through what is an emergency vs. what requires urgent attention. In some environments everything that is escalated may appear to be an emergency. If you were to verify this with the business they may even say that if this doesn't go in heads will roll.

Emergencies are likely the result of a break, a critical incident of some sort. Service to our customers is currently unavailable due to some circumstance or event. Urgent changes may be the result of a potential issue. For example if we do not put this in ASAP there will be an Incident.

Understanding and documenting the differences in the changes is important. If we can report on this in some way we may be able to manage or in other cases prevent these from happening again. in the case of urgent changes we might identify that 8 of the 10 times it happens it is the result of a Vendor who has less than stellar communication skills when it comes to visiting sites. Being able to quantify that fact allows us to review that with them when appropriate.

To summarize having a clear understanding on what constitutes an Emergency vs Urgent changes will allow you to ensure that changes are being prioritized correctly and that all input and output processes are performing optimally.