By Kai Holthaus
That, of course, depends (favorite answer of consultants everywhere…). As an IT executive, start by asking yourself what you want to achieve. Once you select a critical success factor (CSF), key performance indicator (KPI) or associated metrics and start to report on those metrics, you will see two types of behavior within your IT organization.
Most of your employees will want to be good team players, and they will work to meet the desirable metrics (and avoid undesirable ones). For example, if you start reporting on the number of changes implemented without proper authorization (which could be discovered through configuration audits), and you start disciplining staff for implementing changes without authorization, you will see the number of unauthorized changes go down (in most cases). However, you will also find that some staff will try to game the system by implementing changes without proper authorization, then making it look as if (in your tracking system) they’d had the authorization.
Also keep in mind, that metrics can have unintended consequences. Sticking with the example of tracking (and trying to reduce) the number of unauthorized changes, you may be surprised to see the backlog of changes waiting to be approved grow, because your approval process was not yet ready to handle all the change that was going on in your environment. So, it’s a good practice to be prepared to adjust your metrics accordingly. This also applies to metrics that have been in place for a while. If you have driven the number of authorized changes to zero, and have held it there for the last 12 months, you may want to consider adjusting your focus to other issues (but don’t lose sight completely…unauthorized changes can quickly creep back in).
Finally, make sure that you can actually measure the things you need to measure to report on CSFs and KPIs. Setting a goal of no unauthorized changes is laudable but will remain a goal until you have found a way to detect unauthorized changes.
To conclude, here are some examples of KPIs to consider for your change management process:
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Kai Holthaus is a transformation consultant with VMware Accelerate Advisory Services and is based in Oregon.
