Change Management and Emergency Change

Purpose behind Change Management Process: ITIL is all about Standardizing methods and then continuously improving them, And same goes for CM(change management).
CM is to ensure we standardize our processes
CM ensures proper recording of changes in assets and configuration items
Reduce risk to the business/operations
Fixing Incidents

Objective of CM: CM process ensures that the change is recorded, evaluated, approved, prioritized, planned, tested, implemented and reviewed.
Now we will start with first step and that is Recording of change or standardizing the recording:
I suggest that organization follow 1 template for every change request. This ensure the appropriate information is available to begin with. Some basic template questions can be decided into these areas:
Description of Change: Change required, Duration of change, Implementation group, change driver
Justification: Reason for change, Benefit of change, Ramifications of not implementing change
Service Impact: Service interruption and change impact
Risk of Change Failure: Chances of change failing, ramifications of change failure
Testing: Was the test successful, backout plan
Logs: Implementation Details
If organization follows a template as above, I can almost guarantee that all approvers will be very happy and the approval cycle will be fast. This will also show that the SME is ready and has all the information about the change. Improves confidence and also outcome. This will cover us in next few steps: Evaluation, Approval.

Next is Prioritization: This is where Release Manager comes into play. With the help of release manager this can be prioritized and planned for release. If this change is to fix an incident then we will go to end of this post to Emergency Change.

Testing and Implementation is done by various teams to make sure that the change does not result into any unwanted incidents.
Review: This is done by Change Manager at the end to see if there is anything we can learn from this.
Now comes the fun topic: Emergency Changes

When a Critical Incident or Priority 1 incident is going on and a change is suggested by the techs we need to follow Emergency Change policy. There is no time in this situation to follow regular change policy so Incident Managers asks ECAB(Emergency Change Advisory Board) to approve the change. Once approved Change is implemented and confirmed by the client is issue is resolved. ECAB and Emergency changes mostly are executed by Incident Manager and also controlled. Change Record is still created by SME.

KPIs for Change Management:
1) % of failed change
2) % of change causing Incident
3) Change Success rate