Thoughts on change management

or How not to do change management

It’s necessary.

Yes, really.

But only if it’s done right.

I used to work at this one place, large company, merger, management swaps. New folks didn’t trust anybody. They imposed a much stricter change control process (not a bad thing) with almost no communication overall and zero written communication. So nobody knew which way to go, who needed to approve and how much further ahead changes needed to be scheduled.

Then they added a weekly review call, planted it in the evening for half the staff, and demanded all changes be added to a… spreadsheet. Manually. Then decided that there were way too many changes and only some should be reviewed. Of course, yes you guessed it, no thoughts presented on what should and what shouldn’t be presented. It really was a free for all.

Where do you think this ends up? With admins obviously not willing to spend the time to put in documentation for which requirements are sketchy at best, approvals are unsure, and communication is either nonexistent or way too much, while overhead for just submitting the change is frankly unmanageable.

Result? Shadow IT with real admins, with the best ones frustrated in an uncertain environment and just… ready to leave.