Most small businesses feel that Change Management is too controlling and that it is not possible to implement
change quickly when you have a long-drawn process. Change Management will not be complicated unless you
plan to complicate it. It is about having a simple plan and organizing yourself so that you don’t have surprises
downtime.
In my opinion, every organization needs change management. It helps IT Managers and IT staff to keep
executives and stake holders informed when important changes happen. When everyone from executives to IT
staff is involved from decision-making to implementation it leaves no space for unwanted surprises.
Why did we adopt Change Management?
Our recruitment process for a fresher includes two parts: aptitude tests and personal interviews. Users have to
log on to our testing platform -Zoho Challenge. Zoho Challenge was hosted on a Windows server. The candidates
were all seated and going through the regular test preparation brief. Everything was supposed to go as
planned. Boom, the server crashed and our testing application went down with it. After all the pep talk about
the productivity and efficiency, it was a real embarassment to go back and say that the server crashed and
everyone had to wait till we resolved the situation.
When we checked, we found that our helpdesk staff had applied the latest security patch in the system and it
failed to start. It turned out that it was not completely their fault as they had a policy to ensure that the latest
security patch was applied on all servers.
It was a simple communication gap, but a big loss of face.
Lesson:
We did not have a method to communicate to the HR department about the system update. If informed, they
could have scheduled the test later and if it was an important test, the upgrade could have done later that
night.
Result: We got Change Management in place.