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November 11 The Measure of ChangeI previously mentioned that Change Management was a part of ITIL, and one of the major areas for me as someone who makes more and greater changes to the setup and application layer of the University Managed Desktop at the University of Edinburgh than anyone else.
A lot of the learning process from being on the course is that the organisation is putting a lot more thought into how we have a process for this change management, especially bringing in ideas from ITIL such as forward schedules of change, a change advisory board and documented processes. I'm glad of this, as this has been something I have pushed for. Up until now, what has happened is that I tended to be the arbiter of these changes, and I went through my own (documented) process of change and announcement.
One thing that has fascinated me about this is that this is another area where ITIL suggests these processes get setup but does not prescribe what that process should look like. This is the way it should be, obviously, because each organisation is different. If you talk about application support and managed desktops, a common method in Universities is to only make major changes to the core set of applications once a year. A good example of this that I have mentioned in this blog is the situation with Firefox, where we only change a major supported version (eg. 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 or soon, 3.0) once a year, during the so-called quieter summer months. Then through the year, as patches are released, they are tested and then deployed. However, in other organisations things are quite different. I know a common methodology in some major banks is to have quarterly releases of the desktop, and have very little change inbetween each update. I have to say, I am growing to like this idea more and more - you release a desktop, rebuild everyone's machine to the new version and then for 3 months you can develop and extensively test the next iteration and release it. Arguably, it couldn't work in a University environment, but with Universities now having more and more going on during the summer, maybe the one-update-a-year idea is growing old.
But that's for the Change Advisory Board to decide! TrackbacksWeblogs that reference this entry
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