Change is what keeps the world evolving. Thanks to changes, it has been developing, and it is change that guarantees the progress of our civilization. In IT Service Management discipline, change is equally important. It enables continuous improvement and proper functioning of IT Services.

On the other hand change may have negative impact on the business. While IT operations teams try to reach 100% service availability, change could break it down. Effective change management is what we need to avoid problems and downtime.
ITIL provides us with excellent tools to support IT departments in dealing with change. Change Management process protects the IT service provider from unwanted results of the change.

Referring to ITIL v3, Change Management is “the process responsible for controlling the Lifecycle of all Changes”. The main objective of Change Management is to perform change which is to be beneficial to the Service with possible minimum disruption to the business.  Each particular change requires formal authorization. It is obtained from change authority and may have different levels. The level of authorization depends on a particular type of change. When change is approved Change Management takes the overall responsibility for this change.  It should be noted that before the change is deployed, release package containing all change details is to be planned, designed, built and tested by Release Management.

Managing changes means managing much of the potential risk changes can bring in. It is to optimise exposure to risk so that business requirements are satisfied. Institute of Internal Auditors provides us with the following indicators of poor Change Management:

·    unauthorized changes
·    unplanned outages
·    a low change success rate
·    a high number of emergency changes
·    delayed project implementations.


Based on these indicators we are able to assess Change Management capabilities of an organization.

As far as the main types of change are considered, there is reactive and proactive change. The former arises in response to problems and changing circumstances. The latter ensures improvement of the service or reduces its costs.

Another issue worth mentioning is the scope of Change Management. Does it refer to all changes in IT environment? Generally speaking, Change Management is controlling change to all service assets and configuration items which are recorded in Configuration Management Database. The question remains what Configuration Items we should manage.