Real World Computing

Since my last post, I've been busy with a lot of things, but one of the most important things has been change management. The problems I, and most other IT people always seem to face is the constant influx of half-baked ideas from Management filtering down without proper paperwork. It has always been a policy of mine to not say "NO" to people without giving their problems/solutions serious thought. Unfortunately this takes quite a toll on my time. This has been a good policy and I'd strongly advise anyone who has Juinor IT staff, particularly helpdesk people, to take a policy like this onboard. Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite so well in IT Management. Here, we need to take a tougher stance. One of the worst aspects of being proactive as well as responsive to user requests is that it encourages plausible deniability. Users who get into trouble about a project, or change their mind about it, can easily deny having asked for it in the first place. It does...

We're having a lot of trouble at work at the moment over business ownership and change management. Here's how the cycle works... 1. Something goes wrong 2. Blame IT 3. Say that IT Needs proper "change management" and authorisation 4. Make IT Write a Business Process for Change Management 5. IT Writes about Business Ownership and Signoff 6. IT Presents it to Management (Personally) 7. Management agree that this is good, but a lot of work 8. IT Takes it to a committee who decide that it's too much work 9. Committee says "we don't want to be bothered with this kind of work" 10. IT is required to rewrite the procedures so that minimal authorisation is required (Everything chuggs along again happily until something else goes wrong - then the cycle restarts). Sorry if this all sounds very negative. I'll have some more constructive thoughts on change management once I get a little more time to report it.