Change management is a process that has been designed to minimise the disruption ‘something new’ causes to a business. The process determines, controls the risk and impact to the Credit Union. Change management is frequently used in IT projects to understand, document the impact a change within in an IT solution – hardware/software or other causes.
Change management is a standard set of procedures, comes from the Project Management environment. These procedures have been tried and tested, are followed to ensure that every change, addition or removal to the Credit Union’s IT infrastructure or software platforms is tracked and secure. We work with credit union and their outsourced partners to design change management procedures in line with current IT Managed Service Offering.
Benefit of Change Management
Change is a planned and a managed process. The benefits of the change are known before implementation and serve as motivators and assessment of progress.
The process of change is a joint exercise between a Credit Union and their IT Managed Service provider to prevent introducing any hardware or software that could interrupt the system and affect your day-to-day activity.
The Credit Union is responsible in overseeing the change management environment, engaging with the Outsourced Provider. The provider IS responsible for reviewing suggested changes and assessing their impact, then managing testing and deployment following the Credit Union’s defined change management procedure. The results of successful change management, especially as part of an IT Managed Service will be a much smoother integration of hardware and software.
- The organisation can respond faster to customer demands.
- Helps to align existing resources within the organisation.
- Change management allows the assessment of overall impact of a change.
- Change can be implemented without negatively effecting the day to day running of business.
- The time needed to implement change is reduced.
- The possibility of unsuccessful change is reduced.
- Employee performance increases when staff feel supported and understand the change process.
- Increased customer service and effective service to clients from confident and knowledgeable employees.
- Change management provides a way to anticipate challenges and respond to these efficiently.
- An effective change management process lowers the risk associated with change.
- Managed costs of change: change management helps to contain costs associated with the change.
- Increased return on investment (ROI).
Why is Change Management Required
The daily operations of any credit union and or any business is complicated, the demands made on the staff time and resources intensify daily, the manager and or staff needs to understand that the process will be managed in a smooth manner and nothing left to change – peace of mind? If you can’t answer this question with confidence, or if you know it’s unlikely you’ll be able to focus on this area, you should consider outsourcing this function.
Change Management Policy
Introduction The purpose of this policy is to document the way that we manage changes that occur to IT Services in a way that minimises risk and impact to the Credit Union. It will also define a Change as understood by IT Services.
Definition of a change
Typically the change management policy will define a change as “anything that transforms, alters, or modifies the operating environment or standard operating procedures of any system or service that has the potential to affect the stability and reliability of the infrastructure or disrupt the business of the credit union”.
Changes may be required for many reasons, including, but not limited to:
- User requests
- Vendor recommended/required changes
- Changes in regulations
- Hardware and/or software upgrades
- Hardware or software failures
- Changes or modifications to the infrastructure
- Environmental changes (electrical, air conditioning, data centre, etc)
- Unforeseen events
- Periodic Maintenance
A change management policy is overseen by staff/ directors of the credit union with a suitable person to manage this. This group is called a Change Advisory Board, CAB, essentially a team or committee to discuss all changes and understand their impact to the operations of the credit union. It is advisable to have more than 2 persons on this for any significant project.
Risk
A Change Management Policy will define the risk’s involved.
Download this Change Management Policy
For a downloadable version of this policy, please click on this link
< link>
Hardware and software are the nuts and bolts of your organisation, which is why a single unapproved change to your Credit Union technology could disrupt system-wide operations, with negative knock-on effects and delays.