Lightweight Change Management
On Tuesday evening someone changed a firewall rule to fix one thing. On Wednesday morning the desk received twenty-two tickets about another thing. It spent three hours proving it was not the network, and found the rule at eleven o'clock by asking around. Nothing was written down because writing it down felt like bureaucracy. The three hours were not counted as the cost of skipping it. Change management has a bad name because the big version deserves one: boards, forms, a fortnight's lead time to restart a service. The small version is a sentence in a record and a glance at a calendar. It would have saved Wednesday.
This series is the small version. It covers what change management is for, which is two things and neither of them is control. It covers what needs review and what does not, with a pre-approved list. It covers the one-page change record you can fill in five minutes, and a weekly change review that takes fifteen. Then come emergency changes, done fast and still written down. It covers tracking changes in an ordinary help desk tool without a change module. The test of a change process is whether the person who did not make the change can find out what changed. Everything else is optional.
Articles in This Series
- What Change Management Is For (Not Bureaucracy)
Two purposes: not breaking things, and knowing what changed when something breaks; the incident-after-change pattern; and a purpose card. - What Needs Review and What Does Not: Three Kinds of Change
Standard, normal and emergency changes in plain words, the pre-approved list, the risk questions, and a classification table. - The One-Page Change Record You Can Write in Five Minutes
What, why, when, risk, rollback, test, who; writing it in five minutes; and the record to copy. - A Change Review That Takes Fifteen Minutes
The small-team alternative to a change board, the calendar, the conflicts, freeze periods, and a review agenda. - Emergency Changes: Moving Fast and Still Writing It Down
Moving fast and still writing it down, the after-the-fact record, what counts as an emergency and what is impatience, and the emergency record. - Tracking Changes Without a Change Module
A change department or form, a subject prefix, linking the change ticket to the tickets it caused or fixed, the change log, and honest words about tools without a module.
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This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.