In our previous blog post 3 Regulators’ Perspectives on Change and Resilience, we summarized how views on resilience are shifting. However, there is a long way to go before regulators and enterprises recognize not only the role of change in resilience but what constitutes competency in change management. If 80% of all major outages have their root cause in change, why is this not the first priority when it comes to reducing risk? In this blog, we will focus on areas where enterprises can reduce their level of risk.
We believe that the lack of competency in change management is due to the lack of solutions available to aid enterprises in their quest for better change management. Without a real technical solution to common change problems, many enterprises are forced to accept the increased amount of incidents and outages and scramble to fix them when they occur.
So, how can organizations start reducing risk at its source and improve their change management competency?
1. A long-term view and management of change at an enterprise level
More change means more risk. Without a consolidated view of all upcoming change events (transformations, resilience tests, releases, continuous releases, migrations) how can anyone manage for resource contention and acceptable risk levels over the upcoming release weekends?
Greater visibility of what is being done at an enterprise level will help you to understand when changes are occurring and plan further in advance to avoid clashes and delayed changes.
2. A holistic view of change
Without a single theatre for viewing and executing change, risk increases. A common source of errors in enterprise change is derived from a lack of consolidated visibility across the spectrum of change. Using spreadsheets to plan and orchestrate multiple teams and complexly-interdependent tasks is a huge and manually-intensive job that offers a lot of opportunity for human error. The ability to see what is happening in the event in real time is also impossible when relying on spreadsheets, emails and phone calls. Better tooling is needed in this area to give people greater control and to reduce avoidable errors.
3. Accountability
Accountability and ownership empower people to do their work well. It’s important to give people a better understanding of their role within a larger piece of work, as well as the purpose of the change itself. Greater accountability allows you to see who is responsible for what and have greater visibility of where delays or errors are occurring. Without a single source of record, it is very difficult to hold people accountable.
4. Orchestrate humans and technology at pace
Automating the running of the event and the handoffs between human and automated tasks will massively reduce the likelihood of an event failing. Cutover is the only platform that allows you to orchestrate both human and machine tasks during an event to ensure more successful and resilient enterprise change.
5. Continuous Improvement
Most change events and resilience tests end with a sigh of relief: “we passed!” Our perspective is that each event should be a learning opportunity for improving the next one. If organizations strive to get better and have the data they need to properly evaluate previous events, then magic occurs - fewer incidents and more change capacity! Cutover provides you with the data you need to enable continuous improvement.
Cutover's Work Orchestration and Observability platform provides a long-term view of change and a high level of visibility and accountability that cannot be achieved with spreadsheets and traditional project management tools. Even for enterprises that do understand that they need to improve how they deliver change, knowing how is a big challenge. To find out more about how Cutover can improve the resilience of your enterprise change, download our fact sheet.