Time for a change: how better change management addresses five CIO challenges

By Dominic Tavassoli, Telelogic, An IBM Company

Governance and compliance. Improving productivity while cutting costs. Streamlining business processes. These critical issues – and unfortunately many others – are challenging today's CIOs. At the heart of each of these challenges is change – an inevitable force as customers demand product enhancements, new regulations emerge and projects become more complex.

Implementing better change management practices is the key to overcoming cost, productivity and process improvement challenges. It is recommended that organizations move away from haphazard change gathering and reporting methods in favor of a change management process supported by a common tool and repository that can be used across the organization, regardless of the geographic location of development teams. With this in mind, let’s examine five top CIO challenges and how better Change Management can make a difference.

More productivity, less time

Deciding whether to replace or upgrade existing, often costly, IT Change Management systems is at the top of the list of CIO challenges. Managing change requests, defects, bug reports, enhancement requests and problem reports without a common process in place is usually the catalyst for this decision. It is virtually impossible to streamline and accelerate Change Management when information is pouring in from many different avenues, such as spreadsheets, email threads, phone conversations and meeting minutes, especially when development teams are using disparate software tools.

Despite the need for a common process and supporting products for handling change requests, many organizations hesitate to adopt a new change management system because management perceives them as too expensive. There is, however, a solution that gives organizations the opportunity to adopt world-class Change Management while reducing operating costs.

Implementing Enterprise Change Management (ECM) solutions enable organizations to use one common system with a single repository that consolidates change management data and processes, eliminating the need for multiple expensive tools. The following key features make an ECM solution for Change Management an attractive and affordable choice:

• Highly scalable to allow concurrent access by thousands of users around the world
• Web-based access for a low total cost of ownership and deployment
• Easier, cost-effective integration with common software used by all team stakeholders to reduce the “silo effect”

In addition, organizations can lower costs by enabling a paperless process and reduce travel costs by promoting global access, reporting and virtual meetings. For instance, a change control board (CCB) no longer has to meet in-person to discuss and decide issues. The problems associated with scheduling and the time spent traveling can be avoided altogether with online, real-time reports and decision-making.

Get to Grips with Compliance

CIOs are also challenged to support initiatives to meet an increasing number of compliance requirements for regulations and various appraisal systems. These include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Basel II and the UK’s Data Protection Act, as well as such initiatives as Capability Maturity Model ® Integration (CMMI), Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE ), ISO 9000, Agile™, Six Sigma® and ITIL®. Effective Change Management is key to eliminating poor communication and coordination of changes that can lead to misreporting, missed deadlines and expensive fines imposed for noncompliance.

In this scenario, an ECM solution for Change Management can help ensure the integrity, security and reliability of data by providing customizable interfaces for consistent data capture in a central repository. As such, management is assured that data is consistent and clean for audits and reporting. Furthermore, controlled access rights and e-signature functionality guarantee that the data is reliable, secure and safe from unauthorized modification.

An ECM solution for Change Management can also enforce a controlled, repeatable process to demonstrate compliance accurately and more efficiently. ECM can do this in the following ways:

• Provide customizable workflow engines to define the status, transitions and rules of business processes
• Deliver ready-to-use process packages to simplify and accelerate deployment
• Supply Web interfaces to put global development teams on the same page when managing change requests

Improvements in change management practices can also help organizations demonstrate adherence to industry standards in both internal and external audits. By deploying an ECM solution, management can produce reports and charts generated in real-time from the data repository, without impacting team productivity. They can respond to audits faster and with more confidence because the common repository provides wide visibility into process, trends and progress.

Cut your errors while cutting costs

Changes or enhancements to requirements run the risk of introducing new errors or defects, which leads to costly rework and maintenance. ECM solutions can help development teams both avoid and find errors early in the lifecycle when it is cheaper to fix them. These early fixes also contribute to achieving on-time market delivery, reducing the overall cost of development – not to mention eliminating frustrating rework for the team.

In addition to improving the change management process, an ECM solution also provides improvements in team communication and coordination. Using a common tool and having access to requirements changes in a single repository helps avoid confusion, as well as provide more control on how information is managed throughout the lifecycle. To increase team efficiency, an ECM solution can provide regular reporting, including the following:

Scrum reports on the work accomplished by each team, issue discussions, priority reviews and assignments

Burn down charts, which display the work left to do versus time remaining to predict when the job will be completed

CMMI causal analysis reports

Team to-do lists

Release notes

Requirements-to-code traceability reports

Defect trend analysis

Defect aging reports

Teamwork balance analysis

Get smarter about change

Projects usually fail not because of poor team performance, but because of miscommunication about changes to requirements. For example, a distributed development team in India may assume that a defect has been fixed by the U.S. team or vice versa. Changes can also be missed when team members leave in mid-project. Project teams need accurate change related data throughout the development lifecycle to successfully meet customer requirements and time-to-market deadlines.

ECM for Change Management solves this challenge by providing a knowledge base that can be leveraged by all project teams, regardless of location. This solution can even control the impact of team turnover by automatically recording comments, actions and decisions. Using the change database, teams and project managers can leverage this knowledge about change by:

• Searching for previous defects to identify past solutions to previous similar issues
• Using the system as a reference point for capturing information about partners, subcontractors and outsourced teams
• Capturing metrics on all projects to improve the management of future projects

Overall, the flow of accurate and consistent data to all project teams and stakeholders can be the cornerstone of every successful project.

Measure, Improve, Repeat

Process improvement is on every CIO’s to -do list as the first essential step to improving project success. By implementing a consistent development process, project teams are able to quickly and cost effectively create the applications and products the organization needs to meet its business goals.

Of course, improving a development process is not easy. Because the cost of change is more apparent than the eventual benefit, most organizations struggle to prove that their process decisions have had an impact on the bottom line. As a result, requests to “work smarter, not harder” rarely come with the budget or authority to implement the necessary changes.

ECM for Change Management can identify errors and faults throughout the development process. This information can be entered into the defect analysis and resolution phases so that management can answer questions similar to the following:

• When was the problem found?
• When was it introduced into the process?
• Was the problem identified or missed during the inspection phases?
• What are the costs associated with the problem?
• The results of this analysis can provide tangible information on weak links in the development process. As a result, management will know exactly where to focus process improvements and direct funds to those areas in an objective, quantified way.

ECM solutions and their dashboards also provide reports that reveal the evolution of key metrics for all projects. The process improvement team can use these trend reports to prove the impact of their decisions and justify the expenditures on change management products. Not only does this make the case for process improvement much easier, it also facilitates discussions between field personnel and senior management. The bottom line is that it is easier to build management trust and improve the development process when you can demonstrate substantial ROI.

Change Management Tools – Under the Hood

Not even the best-in-class ECM solution will work if development teams either won’t use it or have difficulty with it. Consider factors such as proven usability – an intuitive interface and features that are easy to learn and use – that will support optimal productivity and a successful deployment. Look for options that ensure that teams can get the information they need instantly in a common repository, such as effort progress bars, dynamically generated process help, auto-generated lifecycle views with drag and drop capability and interactive visualizations. Other preferred features and functionality include the following:

• Predefined roles and privileges
• The ability to create new roles
• Customizable workflow definitions that fit any organization
• Change request forms that accelerate change implementation
• The ability to include multiple attachments with each change request
• Ready-to-use, standard report formats
• A tool for more advanced report creation
• A powerful and flexible query mechanism to turn raw data into valuable information

An ECM solution should also be compatible with the organization’s workflows, as well as business processes. Usability with security restrictions, when necessary, is key. The solution should use terminology that is familiar to daily users, as well as have the option to provide secure, role-based access.

Embracing Change across the Enterprise

Change is inevitable, continuous and necessary for organizations to grow, evolve and stay competitive. However, anticipating and managing change is challenging and can be costly, especially when projects are complex and development teams are distributed around the globe.

In today’s globally diversified development organizations, it is imperative to respond efficiently to change while making productivity gains and reducing development costs. Project managers must have total control and visibility of changes to requirements. It is the only way to make the best decisions regarding the cost and implications of changes before they are implemented. Organizations also need to reduce the costs associated with Change Management while providing users with world-class support. Change also brings with it the chance for error, which can lead to problems associated with governance and compliance – a major issue in today’s highly regulated business environment.

Moreover, CIOs are challenged to help their software development teams communicate and collaborate more effectively to eliminate costly rework due to errors caught late in the lifecycle. This issue – plus the increasing pressure to deliver products faster, cheaper and at the highest quality – are among the drivers that justify investment in better change management practices.

The good news is that Change Management does not have to be a costly, convoluted nightmare. ECM solutions enable development teams to ensure data integrity through a controlled, repeatable process with established workflows and best practices. ECM solutions must have a robust framework to ensure a high ROI, as well as features that are intuitive and easy to use, easy to deploy and cost effective to maintain. ECM solutions also improve developer productivity, which results in reduced cost of development and faster time-to-market. With ECM solutions, organizations can also capture, manage and leverage their change management knowledge to improve current development processes and future success rates, plus realize a substantial ROI.

For more information about Telelogic Change™, a Web-based change management solution for request tracking and reporting, visit www.telelogic.com/change .

Learn more about the benefits of global ALM. Go to www.telelogic.com/globalalm and register to download the free white paper, Taking Your Software Process Maturity to the Next Level: Building Better Software with ALM, by Dominic Tavassoli, VP of Product Marketing – Change and Configuration Management Applications.

www.telelogic.com/globalalm