all right thank you we're back with serviced sharp and talking about all things service now and probably some things not service now as we go forward but and actually we'll be talking a little bit outside of service now because istill is not technically service now it's it's a framework that service now was built around or tuned for no no no I search now is I tell but ITIL is also service now okay use everybody thank you so today we're gonna talk about everybody's favorite topic in the entire world and change management I know everybody loves submitting change requests and going through the process of getting changes approved but it's an important topic you know I think that you know I mean the reality is probably most people hate the change management process I don't I don't think anybody loves the change management process but I've seen it done really bad and I've seen it done really well yeah and there is a way to make it done make it really well and make it where people don't hate it they're willing to do it and automate stuff there's a lot of a lot of opportunities to use the workflows to automate stuff so we're we're gonna cover a couple things like the definitions what are what are the different changes and new kind of the this is this is gonna be a little bit technical but a little bit of a primer on ITIL change management yeah yeah so I'm all you I tell experts out there correct that's what we're wrong yes yes can if you're listening the other way yeah correct us if we're wrong and you know from the type of the side you developers and and admins give us some tips and tricks that we may not touch on and change management is a big topic so we may not finish everything that we had planned to talk about in this episode and if we don't we'll just continue it and we'll bring the next episode in and do that change management yeah I have a feeling this is gonna be a couple a couple episodes okay change management's big yeah it's it's a big deal and there's a lot to think about when you when you start change management I think number one wine why do we even need change of management you why is it important to have change management yeah so that's the one thing that I think that people don't they people miss the change management we're going on forever I mean look at the Toyota factories and in that kind of decision that's where a lot of that stuff started you know in manufacturing that kind of philosophies of you know having really good change management but I will say though with with ServiceNow you know they've got three different changes they've got you know normal standard and emergency hmm I've been in organizations where the emergency changes have been sixty percent 70 percent of their changes mmm-hmm and I've been in organizations that one to two percent our emergency changes which by the way that's the way it's supposed to be yeah theoretically yeah in real world it's usually a little bit more than one or two percent but I mean that's what good luck driving for yeah as few emergency changes as possible I think that's a good metric if you don't have a lot of good metrics yet that the amount of emergency changes you're doing in a certain time period should probably be one of them yes and I can tell you whether or not you're you know how I mean it can help you tell how mature your IT organization is or your business is in general is how many bridges new changes you're having to pump out I'd like to go back a little bit though on the why of change management from a person who spent most of his life troubleshooting things change management is really really important when you're not the only person in the mix so if you're the only person that there is then you can just go willy-nilly changing everything you want eventually you're gonna forget what all the changes you made and you're gonna be upset with yourself because you can't figure it all out but it doesn't really impact as big but when you're in our organization when you're in a company where there's more than one person you change things you increase the complexity of troubleshooting exponentially yeah and think about it like a Rubik's Cube you know if you switch one row it's relatively easy to get it back right but if you go in there and you jumble them all up you spend 30 minutes fidgeting and not paying any attention to what you're doing it's a lot harder to go back and I mean for those people some of you out there can probably solve a Rubik's Cube in like 30 it's another YouTube video out there that teaches you how to do it I still can't do it but anyways mmm the the point is it's a lot harder if you switch that thing 500 times to go back and figure out what the wrong step was then is if you do it one at a time and document things and that's the purpose of change management really is to stop that well in any if you think about it service now just so you know is not a change record system it is a change management system it is to not only document the changes but managed to changes so we manage when we have changes so blackout dates you know so that when are we going to do the changes and the nice thing about it is it keeps us from having conflicts like for example if somebody's shutting down a server well starve if somebody's trying to update it right so there's lots of reasons why change management exists yeah and I think that touches upon an important thing that you need a change manager or a change management team that a lot of companies miss this they don't they don't invest enough in this because but I if I'm entering a change and I say I want to update this networking configuration and it it's only gonna affect this this this and this if there's not someone that has a big-picture view that's reviewing these things or not a committee that's having a big-picture view that reviews these things it's real easy to miss that oh wait that's gonna black out half of the company well that's where having a really good cab comes in place you've got to have the change advisory board it's right if you don't have that and not have people talking about it you're gonna miss stuff and you gotta have the leaders in there you gotta have a lot of people in there and hashing it out and a change management the the cab then change management is a really important part of being able to fail well yeah and and I say fail well because we're gonna fail we're gonna put patches out we're gonna release code that doesn't work the way we think it's going to work we're gonna do things that cause problems but we need to be able to learn from them and if we're not following a good change process and it doesn't have to be a cumbersome change process let's see I think that's out there right here it doesn't have to be a draconian process but if we're not following a good process we can't learn from those failures and they're not useful failures and there's nothing you know there's nothing wrong with failing unless you don't learn something from well not everything has to go through cab there's lots of solutions I mean if it's you know it goes back to the different types of changes mmm you know some do some don't there is a variety of different options and you have a very very good workflow behind workflow engine behind it that you can really set some in you know do some really interesting things with change management so there's three types of changes with ITIL there's normal change and what's a what's an example of a normal change aa normal changing is anything that is not an emergency change and it hasn't been pre-approved and typically low low impact changes are gonna be put through on a standard change so medium and high impact so things that are gonna be the potential for problem is gonna be higher those are gonna be normal changes and all normal changes go through cab right so these are changes that need a little bit of review they need a little bit of lead time right absolutely absolutely and then there's standard changes which are you know standard changes are really great because those are the things that you do every day there they're easily repeatable they're low risk always low-risk changes so these are things that you do all the time that you don't need to be submitting a change request for a normal change request for and going to cab every week things that are pretty innocuous that aren't going to cause a lot of trouble so look if a certain node requires a reboot daily or something like that yeah I mean something to that effect yeah although if a certain note is requiring a reboot daily you might want to do problem management yes which leads me to another point and you know with change management it can give you a better view in what changes are happening and to manage those you can also identify problems from that correct things that you wouldn't even expect hey we've had a change on this particular thing forty-seven times we have had an emergency change six times on this one server right yeah it helps you identify your weak links yeah definitely and then there's the emergency chain we talked about that yeah emergency changes are just that hey everything's down we have a problem this is an emergency now this does get reviewed because again they're not low risk they're a high risk they're gonna probably cause problems mm-hmm so these go to and you know an e cab which is an emergency cab to get approval yeah and you're it's up to your company to really define exactly what the tolerance level for the emergency changes so we've worked at places where a quorum of directors had to sign off on it we worked at places where you were trusted you just make the emergency change but the key is you documented afterwards yeah absolutely so no matter what you need to document and you need to go back through and do that learning part because again if you can't fail well right and all emergency changes need to be looked at every one of them yeah that goes back into having a good change means you're all change all emergency changes should be looked at and said okay this is an emergency change but it really shouldn't have been an emergency change and that has to be addressed with the person who made it and a free tip process owners don't make your change manager Matt yeah don't do that yeah you won't ever get another standard change but either way cab goes a lot easier if you're nice to the change and and I've seen cabs cab be like Mad Max and the Thunderdome before it's been pretty interesting so we've talked about the purpose of change and everything like that as it relates to service now we've talked about that a little bit that service now is a change management platform meaning that it's something you've got a develop yeah you've got a build and you have a the basic ITIL framework and they have some sample workflows and things like that but you're gonna have to configure it for your organization just the way it the way it is in service now I wouldn't recommend somebody who doesn't know anything about change management to to actually be involved with setting that up because that doesn't end well you need somebody that understands the basic ITIL framework before that before you can get it set up correctly well I think that's important I think that my recommendation with anything service now would be to do a process review before you do any implement and absolutely grab it and grab an I tell expert say hey I need you to go over this and yeah build us some good process behind it I always say if you can't do it on paper then you can't do it on you can't automate it yeah exactly exactly and I think one of the biggest things is responsive but a lot of me anything true but a lot of times what we just get is bad results faster so we definitely want to make sure that we're doing the right things who are doing it well and I think the big thing is the responsibilities we have to understand that one one good policy that I've read has the chief the CIO responsible for the change management process when you get a leader of that level committed to being a part of the change process to understanding that it's extremely important they then hold people to it when maybe sometimes other people wouldn't mm-hmm yeah I think that I mean if a change manager process is gonna work it's gonna have to have buy-in from the top down absolutely absolutely and of course you have the change process owners and you have the change the change manager now the change manager is an interesting role you actually you will lead the cabs which again can be quite interesting depending on who's doing the changes at the time but their responsibilities are you know to do the change they maintain they review they want to make sure that everything's running smoothly and it's a big responsibility in in in a lot of organizations I've worked with they have somebody that specifically a change manager and that is not only just a role or a title but it's a Roma it's actually what they do they don't do anything else in the organization that is a great way to do that yeah it's a critical role and you know you don't want your asset manager to be your change manager right yeah you want someone that can actually dedicate time to that process you don't want John in accounting to run your change process he may be a great he might be a great maybe he's an IT expert people true it's really true oh that's right I forget you're Mary doing it now [Laughter] this podcast was made with anchor anchor is the easiest way to create and publish your podcast it's free creation tools with it allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer helps you distribute your podcast it's super simple to publish to Spotify Apple podcast Google Play any of the major ones you can make money from your podcast there's no minimum listenership so they make it super easy to monetize it's really everything you need to make a podcast in one place so why don't you go out and download the free anchor app or go to anchor FM and get started you have to establish a cab and then you have to establish a canny cab and e cabs they address them informally emergency cab yeah the emergency cab they are the other thing we need to talk about after you know you got your change manager set up you have your your cab set up you have your responsibilities you have a change policy that needs to outline you know what is supposed to be done when a change is supposed to be done you know that kind of thing and not everything has to be a change I mean if you're only changing data in a table that's not a change if you're adding a group that's not a change so not everything's a change you have to define what it changes but don't underestimate the enforcement mechanism yeah you have to be able to to have compliance from all of the organization and boils down to leadership yeah you know I think that we could safely say it probably that the most important piece of change management is not the technical piece it's the policy and it is you know it's the follow through on the policy yeah you know I'll just be frank it's a waste of time for you to start doing a change management process or project if you have no intention of driving by you yeah if you don't enforce it and you don't drive by in you're not gonna have a good end result and it's like CMDB when you you know if you don't have a good process for throwing things in the CMDB and for vetting things you just can end up with a mess it's and that's unusable for me what's that yeah I've never seen anybody do that right I get that a lot yeah right right yeah that stand for yeah configuration management database that's that's it yeah yeah you gotta go start yeah but those are things that require a process a lot of thought going through it's boring I understand that it's boring to go through and do the the definitions and the semantics and argue over it and sometimes it feels like especially on the technical side when people are arguing these things sometimes it can feel very frustrating absolutely you know absolutely but you got to understand that that the process has to be there and if the process isn't there if you don't spend that time going through those definitions and semantics then as a developer or an admin you're going to get continually frustrated because you're gonna be changing the chance process on a continual basis how many how many times we had a customer come to us hey I need you to implement service now is change management well that's great and what are your policies yeah what policies right how do you want to do change what so we don't know yeah well I'm glad you don't know because I'm gonna tell you the problem is they think they know and they want to do they have some system they've used somewhere else and it's not ITIL and it doesn't fit but they goes back to if you're not an ideal shop if you don't understand ITIL Service now change management is ITIL framed it is yeah and it's important to have that it's also important understand that ITIL is a framework it is and it is not mandatory like it's not minutes where that you only have three categories of change right that's true but if you're gonna add a fourth category change you need to figure out what you're gonna do with it that's our thing I think that's the key thing that I tell tries to enforce I become UX rich maybe like I don't know hating me right now but can't but one of the key things about ITIL is it's basically saying if you're gonna do something you need to know why you're going to do you need to know how you're going to do it and you need to be able to document that and that's really the fundamental so ITIL is not a step by step not a rulebook blueprint for everything it is a guideline you need to think of these things you need to answer these questions from a technical side we talked about a little bit we've only got a few minutes here we talked a little bit about or a lot about the process i from a technical side what are some of the challenges that that you have with implementing change so one of the challenges that you have implementing the change management process is just that honestly it's the resistance from people not having that buy-in those are the really resistance when you're talking about implementing change management getting everybody together once those processes are defined implementing it and putting in the right fields creating the workflow that's just the easy stuff you give you give a good roadmap of what needs to be done one of the things that I see people go wrong is they don't put enough approvals on things they don't they make it so cumbersome and so difficult technically that people hate it they don't adopt it and they have a problem one of the organizations that I've worked with one of the great things they did is they had an approval on any changes that were low impact even normal changes now I know that doesn't fit necessarily with ServiceNow is change management right but what it did is it allowed people to do those low risks that where they haven't submitted a standard change for that aren't really done very often but a really super low risk that that allows them to go ahead and get approval from there they have to get approval from their manager and then the change manager if those two things happen there automated at you know normal chained normal approvals then it doesn't have to go to cab now they have the option of saying nope goes to cab right but this is something that if you can get those two people to approve which by the way don't make a map those are the people you want so but yeah those kind of things have been great and very successful yeah I think that you you build a process it works for your company and then you implement the process and if the process of implementing change seems to be a nightmare then I would step back and just start from the top and ask are we supporting this are we pushing this through the right way do we have the right people engaged and also you've got to kind of do a mindset shift because when you're talking about change management you need to think about the customer and the customer in this case is anybody entering a change ticket or anybody approving a change ticket or anybody working the cab and so the process for those three people those three things has to be customer friendly you know because if it's cumbersome like you said if it's if it's a horrible process or a horrible UI and you can't figure out what button to click and where to click it people are gonna use it and that's gonna defeat the whole purpose of spending the money to put it in plus if you gotta think about it so one of the things if you're trying to do this yourself if you literally are just an admin you don't have a lot of experience with implementations and here you are you're trying to do it yourself stop just stop you need two things you need a company like sharp stone that has a really good process design part and you need them to be able to do the implementation expediently and do it well I've seen too many times that that they've tried to do it themselves piece it together and it just not work they have to be able to get commitment and commitment from the management is important and you're not gonna get that if they're you're trying to do it on the fly yeah I mean it's possible to do it on the fly yeah it's just the likelihood of it costing you more money down the road is a lot higher absolutely absolutely how many times if we re done what we've redone spend a little bit more upfront to do it right or spend a lot several times later on down the road to redo it right yeah don't don't learn don't make those mistakes learn from our mistakes really get some it in those what they're doing to come in and then help you get change management well I think that that's all the time we have let us know Service sharp at sharp sound group group comm for the email we'll have like I said our social media accounts posted on the till on the podcast notes send us any comments or questions that you might have let us know if you disagree with us we'd love to have without to have a healthy conversation about you know where we might be incorrect or need a little bit of change I'm I'm wrong pretty often my wife tells me yeah yeah she's right thank you very much again this is service sharp and check out the sharp subgroup www ARP subgroup comm have a great one Thanks