by: VMware Sr. Manager for IT Change and Release Automation Sudheendra Chadaga, VMware IT Director Sarita Kar, and VMware Director for IT Infrastructure PMO and Compliance Grant Nowell
As the name is self-explanatory, change management is simply implementing new strategies or taking a systematic approach to achieve the desired transition or transformation of an organization’s goals. It helps people to adapt to change systematically, and also helps an organization to effectively implement and control change. Let’s learn more about change management at VMware.
Change management strategy at VMware
VMware Director for IT Infrastructure PMO and Compliance Grant Nowell explained that a change management or change ‘enablement’ strategy is needed to minimize disruptions to IT services while making changes to critical systems and services.
Our change management practices are designed to reduce incidents and meet our regulatory standards like Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), International Organisation for Standardization (ISO), and Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX).
Aligned with the VMware SaaS transformation journey, the change management process is shifting away from lengthy reviews and nontechnical stakeholder approvals and toward automated, collaborative processes between IT and development teams—processes that increase agility while still balancing risk.
Evolution of change management in the IT industry
VMware Sr. Manager for IT Change and Release Automation Sudheendra Chadaga said that in the last seven years, IT change management has transformed and evolved as a flexible change-enabling service. We have a hybrid change management practice to support service owners and stakeholders, providing them the ability and freedom to move changes forward quickly and efficiently.
A few years ago, the focus was more on completing the process than on faster change approvals or implementations. Since then, we eliminated unnecessary (rubber stamp) approvals and documentation to speed up the workflow.
Today, we have strong compliance controls and a well-defined change management policy. We also implemented automated change ticket creation and approval. On average, the change management team reviews and processes more than 17,000 change tickets per year, of which 70 percent are application changes and 85 percent are code deployments to production. These are all which are ‘zero touch,’ meaning these deployments are triggered automatically post change advisory board (CAB) approval.
Change transformation at VMware
We were searching for a new flexible change management application for automation and integration. After a lot of research, proofs of concept (POCs), and brainstorming, we decided to onboard the Jira service desk in 2015, which enabled us to integrate with project management, incident management, monitoring, and various other applications.
This transformation helped us implement critical processes and workflow automations. Apart from transforming our application, we also needed to transform our change management policy and procedures to align with the SaaS world. Our team did a lot of research to customize workflows and procedures to provide flexible, compliant, and effective change management. In a parallel work stream, we conducted a series of training sessions, awareness camps, and published blogs and articles about the transformation. See Figure 1.
Factors to consider for change management
Apart from ease of use, we had to consider tool automation, integration, reporting, and dashboard capabilities. The biggest plus of the Jira service desk was that it had out-of-the-box integration with project tracking (Jira) and evidence documentation (Confluence). With the new tool and automation practices, we can ensure efficient and prompt handling of changes to IT infrastructure/code and provide better visibility into our stakeholders and management using customized dashboards.
Challenges during the implementation of change management strategy
When we started our transformation journey, the biggest challenge was to balance flexibility and compliance. We wanted to make our change owners and developers happy with simple forms and workflows, to remove unnecessary approvals, and save total ticket submission/progression time.
On the other hand, we were also concerned about the compliance regulations. We conducted many discussion/brainstorming sessions with subject matter experts (SMEs) to discover the best ways to balance both challenges. Next, was creating awareness about the importance of change management and compliance.
Future of change management at VMware
The future looks bright for the VMware SaaS transformation journey and our solutions in this space. Our goal has always been to implement the right practices and culture by which change management can result in fewer incidents, Change management is not just a documentation process, it is an ongoing process and a responsibility shared by management, business, development, QA and the monitoring teams (from initiation to closure). It should be a part of the overall business strategy, and it should be an effort that evolves with the organization to align technology and capability continuously.
Over the last few years, our priority was to simplify and automate processes and workflows wherever possible. We also prioritized streamlining the change intake process, automated ticket creation, identifying and encouraging standard changes, effective reporting, etc. Today, 30 percent of the change tickets are automatically generated from Jira user stories (4K out of more than 17K changes), and our focus will continue to increase that number. As mentioned earlier, 85 percent of code deployments are zero touch, and we will continue our efforts to implement further automation.
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