Change management is one of the most-discussed, studied, and analyzed processes in the world of business. If your company isn’t on top of the latest developments in this essential process, you stand to fall behind every competitor who pays close attention to the topic. What must every organizational leader know about managing IT change within the business? Here are the basics that can act as a starting point for building a comprehensive knowledge base.

What It Is

Constant change is essential when it comes to a business growing and adapting. If IT change management is so important for the modern commercial entity, the first rule should be to define it. Simply put, it’s an effective way to streamline IT service management that helps your company seamlessly implement changes to the technical environment or infrastructure. The process achieves this lofty goal by creating specific ways for your organization’s managers to approve and authorize every conceivable kind of change. Further, it assists company leaders who need to schedule, request, implement, and ask for necessary changes.

What It Does

When all goes well, this vital form of management does two things very well. First, it minimizes every type of potential service disruption. Second, it works to monitor risk and control it as much as possible. It has many other benefits, but those are the main ones. It’s fast, transparent, makes cost estimates more accurate, and can be easily audited.

The Five Key Benefits

In addition to the two core advantages of ITCM, there are five well-known benefits that are common to most variations, no matter how large or small a company is and no matter what kind of services or products it offers. ITCM service professionals or software have the potential to arrive at relatively accurate cost estimates related to the changes in question, to keep a close eye on the progress of each new implementation in real time, track measurable progress benchmarks and milestones, keep all activities fully transparent throughout, and do it all without delays and frustrating wait periods.

The Three Faces of Change

Battlefield doctors use a system called triage to categorize and prioritize patients. Those with life-threatening conditions are treated first, and those whose injuries are minor move to the back of the line. Everyone in between those two categories is assigned to an intermediary category, which is technically second in line to see the doctor. ITCM is much the same, except we’re not dealing with wounded bodies but with three different categories of change: emergency, standard, and normal. If your team rushes to deal with a pernicious hacking incident by putting several new safeguards in place, that’s obviously an emergency-level incident.

Standard-level activities might include a relatively routine task like installing new webcams on all employee computer stations. There’s no rush, no emergency, and no unknown risks. What’s more, there are written policies that guide the activity every step of the way. More complex changes, but not emergency-level ones, fall into the category of normal. For example, if a law firm decides to take its operation international and add upgraded, costly servers to meet needs of a new, global client base, you’d be looking at a typical case of normal change.