Change Management (ITSM)

'Change management' is an IT service management discipline. The objective of change management in this context is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to control IT infrastructure, in order to minimize the number and impact of any related incidents upon service. Changes in the IT infrastructure may arise reactively in response to problems or externally imposed requirements, e.g. legislative changes, or proactively from seeking improved efficiency and effectiveness or to enable or reflect business initiatives, or from programs, projects or service improvement initiatives. Change management can ensure standardized methods, processes and procedures which are used for all changes, facilitate efficient and prompt handling of all changes, and maintain the proper balance between the need for change and the potential detrimental impact of changes.

Change management within ITSM (as opposed to software engineering or project management) is often associated with ITIL, but the origins of change as an IT management process predate ITIL considerably, at least according to the IBM publication A Management System for the Information Business.

In the ITIL framework, change management is a part of "Service Transition" – transitioning something newly developed (i.e. an update to an existing production environment or deploying something entirely new) from the Service Design phase into Service Operation (also known as Business As Usual) and aims to ensure that standardised methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all changes.

Change management is a process used for managing the planned deployment of alterations to all configuration items in the configuration management database (or "CIs" in the CMDB), that are a part of a business's live ("production") and test ("UAT") environments along with any other environment that a business wants to have under change management – generally all environments that are under the control of 'ICT Operations'. It is not typically responsible for change within development environments (see below).

A change is an event that is:

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