So, from time to time I like to blog about difficulties I’m facing in the IT Service Management World.  There are two major reasons why I love blogging about such topics.  First, I get to kvetch, and for me, kvetching is a minor enjoyment in my life (for reference on kvetching, see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/kvetch).  The second reason is a bit more practical, and it’s to warn others out there that may be facing similar situations or cultures.

This past Wednesday I had a wonderful meeting with the Change Management process owner at my (quasi) new job.  I probably should not have scheduled it on a Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but I wanted to cut to the chase on talking about Change Management and having a meeting before a holiday gets people to cut to it rather quickly.  I don’t want to spend too much time on going over the history of Change Management at my job, but I’ll say that they only have two types of Changes; Normal, and everything else, a.k.a. “Emergency.”  Interestingly, both the Normal and Emergency change “processes” look pretty similar, so I want to make improvements, which took me to Wednesday’s meeting to talk about my ideas.  During the meeting I was showing new processes to follow (with the Normal and Emergency change processes looking to be two distinctly separate processes), and then the question was asked “What about if a Change doesn’t fit as Emergency, but doesn’t get submitted in time for Normal?”  My answer was simple; it gets rejected.

As soon as I finished my simple answer, I could hear the crickets chirping.

This is the part of my job that’s difficult; convincing management that it’s OK to follow policies.  In fact, in some organizations, it’s actually encouraged to follow policies and processes.  And now here I am, a motivated ITSM professional that sees the need for vast improvements to Change Management (thanks to the book Visible Ops), and I’m running into the culture that will happily risk production stability for the sake of easy Change Management.  But I’m not going to worry about it.  Cultures can change and this organization is no different then hundreds of others out there in the IT world.  It really only takes one good rejection to show others that people will follow policy.  At my last job, it was because a Request for Change missed the deadline.  At this new job, I’m sure it’ll be something similar.  After all, the first ” no” is the hardest (I’m thinking song parody to First Cut is the Deepest).

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.