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4 Tips to Increase Velocity in Your ITIL-Based Change Process

For those of us who handle IT change requests on a daily basis, the process can seem as onerous as a Sisyphean task. In this case, rather than a boulder rolling back down the hill, it is the backlog of RFCs that seem to grow every time you complete a request. Let’s face it - the requests are not going to stop coming. The business is trying to change faster, so they need IT to implement change faster. In the end, it is all about doing as much as you can with what you have. Following ITIL best practices and using a solid change management tool goes a long way, but how can the whole task be made less Sisyphean?

The answer may come from borrowing some of the lessons learned from application development. It turns out that many of the same agile practices adopted by programmers over the last decade can greatly improve the continuity, speed and predictability of your organization's IT Change Management – leveraging, not replacing, your existing ITIL best practices and tools.

When you view the never-ending flow of RFCs as roughly equivalent to the flow of feature requests that an application development team receives, and recognize that the goals are the same - to implement the changes as quickly as possible, as close to the user’s expectations as possible, and in a predictable amount of time - then it becomes clear there is much overlap between processing change requests and turning around new features in a software application.

Of course, some of those change requests are for application development, and those clearly lend themselves to agile practices. But as it turns out, agile methodology can help IT manage all types of requests.

It is possible to apply agile practices to the flow of IT change requests and see these same benefits. Here are some specific ideas on how to implement agile methodology without abandoning ITIL best practices or your current change management tool:

1. Use CAB Meetings to Prioritize Backlog

Take an agile methodology mindset to CAB. Instead of holding weekly or monthly CABs, have daily scrums to prioritize change requests. Place the less urgent and non-routine requests on a backlog. Let the responsible teams decide how much of the backlog they can achieve in a short period of time, say two weeks.

In your Change Management tool, create views that clearly indicate which requests are on the backlog, and which are in process.

2. User Stories with Story Points help Document RFCs

Scrutinize the change requests to ensure they are properly broken down, the same way agile software developers break down feature requests into User Stories with Story Points assigned and weighted.

Leveraging the customizability of your change management tool, re-label the Description field as User Story and add a field to contain the Story Points. For most IT organizations, the change requests are relatively short lived and independent of each other. But if your organization has enough large, complex requests that are related to a given system or project, following the agile technique of grouping them into a sprint may make sense. You may even consider forming two teams, one team that manages the shorter lived requests as a constant stream, perhaps using a Kanban approach; while the larger requests flow into a team using a scrum approach.

3. Change Manager becomes Scrum Master

The Change Manager acts as the Scrum Manager, overseeing quick daily standup meetings to talk about progress on the tickets in process. The Scrum Master’s mantra: plan a little, do a little, test a little - create a tight feedback loop.

In a larger organization, where the Change Manager cannot possibly have the bandwidth to be the Scrum Master for all of the supported services, the technical owner of a business service may need to act as the Scrum Master, with the Change Manager overseeing the various business Scrum Masters.

It is important that someone fills the role as Scrum Master in order to insure that the amount of work in process is always minimal (agile methodology is all about finishing what you start and delivering each item before you bite off another). As such, it is critical for the Scrum Master to monitor the batch of changes in progress on a day-to-day basis and be available to help clear roadblocks for those implementing the changes.

4. Continuous Improvement to Optimize Agility

By assigning a size in the form of Story Points and by minimizing the amount of work in progress at a given time, you can judge the velocity of successful changes and provide more transparency into what the bottlenecks are.

As requests are completed, the Story Points assigned to the requests represent a quantity of work completed. The average rate of delivering Story Points over time is the velocity. By charting changes in velocity over time, you can better manage your team’s bandwidth and better predict the time required to work down the backlog of requests.

Increasing the velocity becomes the challenge. Agile prescribes various approaches to eliminate the bottlenecks preventing a faster velocity. The best approach for a handling a continuous stream of requests, where they are not batched into sprints, is likely a cumulative flow diagram. However, if you are batching your requests into sprints, then a scrum approach using a burn down chart may work better.

Either of these approaches can be diagrammed in Excel by exporting the data you collect in your change management tool.

In summary, the best way to attack that seemingly always growing backlog of RFCs requires an ability to expose the bottlenecks that are impacting your ability to increase the speed and predictability by which the requests can be implemented. One way, is to borrow agile software development techniques and overlay them on your existing ITIL processes and tools.

ABOUT Russ Miller

Russ Miller is the CTO of SunView Software, Inc., an ITSM tools vendor he co-founded. He has more than 20 years of experience leading software product development from concept to delivery for companies like IBM, Compuware, Quark, and Intuit. He was an early advocate and adopter of agile software practices and has been immersed in ITIL over the last decade as part of developing the ChangGear ITSM solution.

Related Links:

www.sunviewsoftware.com

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4 Tips to Increase Velocity in Your ITIL-Based Change Process

For those of us who handle IT change requests on a daily basis, the process can seem as onerous as a Sisyphean task. In this case, rather than a boulder rolling back down the hill, it is the backlog of RFCs that seem to grow every time you complete a request. Let’s face it - the requests are not going to stop coming. The business is trying to change faster, so they need IT to implement change faster. In the end, it is all about doing as much as you can with what you have. Following ITIL best practices and using a solid change management tool goes a long way, but how can the whole task be made less Sisyphean?

The answer may come from borrowing some of the lessons learned from application development. It turns out that many of the same agile practices adopted by programmers over the last decade can greatly improve the continuity, speed and predictability of your organization's IT Change Management – leveraging, not replacing, your existing ITIL best practices and tools.

When you view the never-ending flow of RFCs as roughly equivalent to the flow of feature requests that an application development team receives, and recognize that the goals are the same - to implement the changes as quickly as possible, as close to the user’s expectations as possible, and in a predictable amount of time - then it becomes clear there is much overlap between processing change requests and turning around new features in a software application.

Of course, some of those change requests are for application development, and those clearly lend themselves to agile practices. But as it turns out, agile methodology can help IT manage all types of requests.

It is possible to apply agile practices to the flow of IT change requests and see these same benefits. Here are some specific ideas on how to implement agile methodology without abandoning ITIL best practices or your current change management tool:

1. Use CAB Meetings to Prioritize Backlog

Take an agile methodology mindset to CAB. Instead of holding weekly or monthly CABs, have daily scrums to prioritize change requests. Place the less urgent and non-routine requests on a backlog. Let the responsible teams decide how much of the backlog they can achieve in a short period of time, say two weeks.

In your Change Management tool, create views that clearly indicate which requests are on the backlog, and which are in process.

2. User Stories with Story Points help Document RFCs

Scrutinize the change requests to ensure they are properly broken down, the same way agile software developers break down feature requests into User Stories with Story Points assigned and weighted.

Leveraging the customizability of your change management tool, re-label the Description field as User Story and add a field to contain the Story Points. For most IT organizations, the change requests are relatively short lived and independent of each other. But if your organization has enough large, complex requests that are related to a given system or project, following the agile technique of grouping them into a sprint may make sense. You may even consider forming two teams, one team that manages the shorter lived requests as a constant stream, perhaps using a Kanban approach; while the larger requests flow into a team using a scrum approach.

3. Change Manager becomes Scrum Master

The Change Manager acts as the Scrum Manager, overseeing quick daily standup meetings to talk about progress on the tickets in process. The Scrum Master’s mantra: plan a little, do a little, test a little - create a tight feedback loop.

In a larger organization, where the Change Manager cannot possibly have the bandwidth to be the Scrum Master for all of the supported services, the technical owner of a business service may need to act as the Scrum Master, with the Change Manager overseeing the various business Scrum Masters.

It is important that someone fills the role as Scrum Master in order to insure that the amount of work in process is always minimal (agile methodology is all about finishing what you start and delivering each item before you bite off another). As such, it is critical for the Scrum Master to monitor the batch of changes in progress on a day-to-day basis and be available to help clear roadblocks for those implementing the changes.

4. Continuous Improvement to Optimize Agility

By assigning a size in the form of Story Points and by minimizing the amount of work in progress at a given time, you can judge the velocity of successful changes and provide more transparency into what the bottlenecks are.

As requests are completed, the Story Points assigned to the requests represent a quantity of work completed. The average rate of delivering Story Points over time is the velocity. By charting changes in velocity over time, you can better manage your team’s bandwidth and better predict the time required to work down the backlog of requests.

Increasing the velocity becomes the challenge. Agile prescribes various approaches to eliminate the bottlenecks preventing a faster velocity. The best approach for a handling a continuous stream of requests, where they are not batched into sprints, is likely a cumulative flow diagram. However, if you are batching your requests into sprints, then a scrum approach using a burn down chart may work better.

Either of these approaches can be diagrammed in Excel by exporting the data you collect in your change management tool.

In summary, the best way to attack that seemingly always growing backlog of RFCs requires an ability to expose the bottlenecks that are impacting your ability to increase the speed and predictability by which the requests can be implemented. One way, is to borrow agile software development techniques and overlay them on your existing ITIL processes and tools.

ABOUT Russ Miller

Russ Miller is the CTO of SunView Software, Inc., an ITSM tools vendor he co-founded. He has more than 20 years of experience leading software product development from concept to delivery for companies like IBM, Compuware, Quark, and Intuit. He was an early advocate and adopter of agile software practices and has been immersed in ITIL over the last decade as part of developing the ChangGear ITSM solution.

Related Links:

www.sunviewsoftware.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability... 

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...