The problem: the CAB is slowing down your organization

We all know it: the CAB is a bit of a problem. In theory, it’s a great way to control changes in your organization. In practice, it slows down your change approval process. Big time.

There are plenty of organizations where processing requests takes weeks, or even months. In a world where agility and adaptability have become vital for IT organizations, this is unacceptable. But how can you speed up the change approval process without losing control?

It’s time to re-invent your CAB and authorization process. Here’s what’s wrong with your CAB:

Mindset change: not all changes should be evaluated by your CAB

Your CAB probably evaluates all requests for non-standard changes – according to ITIL guidelines. This is not sustainable and you know it.

In most organizations, there are way more change requests than any CAB can handle in their CAB meetings. During such meetings, it’s impossible to discuss all requests in detail – but of course, you shouldn’t strive for this anyway. Most requests have relatively low impact and don’t need a board of six to eight people evaluating them. Simplify your change management process.

You have to find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. You need to determine which change requests are worth the time and attention of your CAB members, and which aren’t. This might sound like a catch-22, because how do you estimate the impact of a change before you’ve made an impact analysis?

Moving towards Quick Impact Scores means CAB members have to give up some control or influence about many of the changes. But it’s worth it: your organization will gain speed, agility, and efficiency.

The solution: introduce a Quick Impact Score

We propose a Quick Impact Score: a slimmed down version of an impact analysis for non-standard changes. The goal is to determine if a change request should be approved, and if so, by whom.

This is how it works.

1. Pick your impact criteria

First, you define some criteria to help you score the impact of a change request. It’s up to you which criteria you use, preferably no more than 5. The combination of the following factors give a pretty good indication of the expected impact of a change:

• Number of affected customers: how many people will be affected by the change when something goes wrong? The higher the number, the higher the impact.
• Costs: what costs would be involved to implement the change? The higher the costs, the higher the impact.
• Number of agents involved: how many agents would be involved in realizing the change? The more agents and parties involved, the higher the impact.
• Security: what security risks would this change entail? If the change could pose a security risk, it’s pretty likely you’re dealing with a high-impact change.
• Laws & regulations: would the change in any way affect your compliance to rules & regulations? If the answer’s yes, the change request is probably high-impact.

2. Define the impact per criteria

For each of these criteria, determine a bandwidth for low, medium, and high impact.

For ‘number of affected customers’ you could distinguish the following; one person or a single team as low, a business unit as medium, and the entire organization as high-impact. Do the same for the other criteria.

When you’re assessing a change request based on these criteria, the total impact score will be decided by the highest score.

3. Determine an authorizer for each impact score

Your next step is to decide who will authorize low, medium, and high-impact change requests. You’re free to design this any which way you want, but in any case, you want to balance quality control with speed of decision-making. The trick is to involve only the necessary individuals.

Here’s how you could handle change request approval:

• Low-impact: no approval needed, request is ready to be processed by the relevant agent. This is typically the case for uncomplicated changes.
• Medium-impact: approval needed by a person. You could delegate this to a Change manager, but it can also be the IT Manager or another process manager. Appoint someone who operates on a tactical level and who’s familiar with the type of changes your team handles.
• High-impact: approval needed by CAB. For these change requests, it’s business as usual.

Usually, about 80 percent of all requests are estimated as having low impact, and 10 to 15 percent as having medium impact. This means that the CAB would have to process only 5 to 10 percent of the change requests they’re currently handling. Let that sink in for a moment: your CAB would have 5 to 10 percent of the workload they have now.

Now you have everything you need to do a Quick Impact Score for your change request. Let’s take this process for a test run.

How to assess the impact of a change request

Say you want to update a free application such as Notepad++ for the entire organization. This can be done by a single application manager in less than a day, and doesn’t pose any security or compliancy issues. So – what does its Quick Impact Score look like?

1. Assess the change request based on your criteria

You assess the criteria as follows:

• Number of affected customers: all employees => high impact
• Costs: free => low impact
• Number of agents involved: 1 => low impact
• Security: no security risks involved => low impact
• Laws & regulations: not applicable

2. The highest score is your impact score

When reviewing the total Quick Impact Score, the impact score of a change request is determined by the highest value – not by an average. In this example, all impact scores are low, except for ‘number of affected customers’, which is high-impact. This means the impact score for this entire change request is high.

3. See if you can lower the impact of your change request

When you have a medium or high-impact change request, the question is: is there anything you can do to lower the impact score?

In the case of updating Notepad++, see if you can decrease the number of customers affected. Perhaps by performing a roll-out outside of your service windows. Or by first doing a roll-out in a small test group. If this is successful, you lower the impact of updating the app for the rest of the organization as well.

How to convince CAB members to give up some control

This Quick Impact Score may raise some objections.

One of the arguments may look like this: “What you propose makes sense, but I don’t think it will work in my organization.” Usually, the underlying problem is that it means CAB members will have to give up control, and most organizations don’t see this happening any time soon.

This argument is understandable. Reviewing every change request with a group of representatives from all kinds of departments is indeed a way to control the risk of proposed changes in functionality or infrastructure. We’re not proposing to get rid of the CAB – it has and will continue to have an important function in your Change process.

But think about this: does the benefit of preventing potential (minor) risks outweigh the disadvantages your current processes has? The time spent by CAB members? The – sometimes ridiculously – long duration of processing requests? The resulting lack of organizational agility? No, it doesn’t.

For many changes, the risks in processing changes is practically zero. Some CABs spend their time evaluating whether to add a field to a certain piece of software. This should be none of their concern.

Yes, moving towards Quick Impact Scores means CAB members have to give up some control or influence about many of the changes. But that’s worth it: your organization will gain speed, agility, and efficiency. And most CAB members would much rather spend their energy on efforts that add more value to the organization instead of spending 2 hours a week reviewing every single change request.

Working towards a more agile CAB

If you truly want to improve the agility and speed of your change process, you have no other option than to revise the way your CAB works.

What if a CAB member objects? Tell them how it frees up time to use their talents in another way, enabling them to have an even bigger impact on the organization than they do now.

More on Agile Service Management

Want more inspiration about how to make your service management more agile?

To dive deeper into Agile Service Management, check out our free e-book with a guide to bring back flexibility, speed and customer focus to your IT team.

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So what can you do to make your change management process easier for everyone?

Make the change management process easy

In my experience, a lot of change processes fall short before they really start, simply because it’s hard to get started. And the most tell-tale symptom of this situation tends to be overestimating what your end-users understand and what they don’t understand.

Keep in mind that end users don’t have an ITIL certificate, and aren’t aware that they are requesting a change. One of the most crucial aspects to getting uptake is to conceal any complexity from your end users.

If, according to your new process, changing the text on an intranet page needs to go through as a change, assume your user doesn’t know this. Just provide them with a clear, easily understandable button such as ‘request changes to intranet content’.

Discover why your change process is too slow – and how to fix it.

Avoid excessive bureaucracy

Similarly, the idea of filling in a form before you can do something is fine; forms are a nice way to capture everything you need to get started so you don’t waste your time. But if you expect somebody to fill in a 5+ page document (13 pages is the worst I’ve seen, personally) and attend 2 meetings to request something mundane, something is up.

When drawing up paperwork, for each element ask yourself this: in what scenario will this be useful during or after this change?

Ultimately, it’s most important to ask yourself: is this part of the process practical for somebody who has a lot of other stuff they need to be doing? Making a conscious effort not to punish your end users for requesting things will help steer your change process in the right direction – towards simplicity.

Check out these four best practices for using forms in your self-service portal

Communicate efficiently – and not too much

There’s a lot to keep track of during even the most simple change management process. But even after your team have gotten their heads around how the change management process is supposed to be implemented, a common error is to expect your stakeholders to know everything you know as well.

Most commonly, though, they don’t. You have identified who your stakeholders are, so make sure to keep them up to date during the process, but in a way where they understand what’s going on (i.e. without using too much jargon). But don’t get too eager. Only update your stakeholders if you have an actual update and let them know that no news is good news.

Also don’t shy away from owning up to mistakes or delays. Hiding things is not transparent and leads to a worse experience.

Let everyone know what changed

When the change is complete – or nearing completion – are you communicating this efficiently? Remember that it’s not just the nearest stakeholders that need to know about the change – everyone who’s affected by the change needs to know, too.

And of course, the bigger the impact of the change, the more formal the information and roll-out process should be. But how?

Again, it’s about clear communication and managing expectations. An email – or any other form of communication – with helpful instructions and clear answers to “why did we do this” and “how did we do this” will be very appreciated. And as a bonus, it will pre-empt some follow up questions and potential criticism.

Put your customer first

Even outside of the change management process, you should always put your end users first. Find out how in our customer centricity e-book!

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Since the majority of people are working from home nowadays, your customers will definitely use your self-service portal more often. That’s why you have to make sure your forms are in tip-top shape. How can you present your services in the most customer-centric way possible? We share four digital self-service portal forms best practices.

Ask yourself the following questions to find out if your self-service portal forms have room for improvement.

1. Can your customers find the form they need?

This may seem like an obvious question, but service desks tend to overlook this because they mostly focus on perfecting the content of their forms.

Organizations often use end user focus groups to test the viability of their self-service portal throughout its design to make sure it’s ‘fit for purpose’ in time for its launch. But do you still meet with your focus groups after your portal has launched? Perhaps when you add a new service to the portal, to consider whether you put it in the most appropriate place?  Focus groups can help you realize your services aren’t as easily found as they were on day one.

What can you do? Find out if one of your end users can find a specific form in under three clicks. If they can – great! If they can’t, find out why. Simply organize a remote focus group and communicate via email, Skype, Google Hangouts – the possibilities in this day and age are endless. And, if you don’t already, make sure one of your service desk employees reviews your services on a regular basis.

Learn more about setting up digital self-service.

2. Is your form clearly laid out?

So, your customer managed to quickly find the form they were looking for. But, once they open the form, they’re overwhelmed by its length and complexity. Perhaps there’s another way we could word the questions we ask, so we’re not confusing our customers.

What seems like a simple question to you might be very open-ended to them. You should always try to ask as many closed questions as possible, for example questions with drop-down answers or radio buttons.

What can you do? Monitor the number of questions you receive about your forms every month. Is there a general trend there? Does the number of questions seem like too many? If so, invite your end users to a (virtual) feedback session to discuss their questions, or publish a feedback form in your self-service portal.

3. Is your form instructive enough?

Using closed questions should minimize the number of confused customers you speak to, but that’s not all you can do. Try linking knowledge items to your forms, so they’re suggested to your customers on the right-hand side of the page. These items will act as readily available FAQs or mini guides that your customers can access directly alongside your form.

Find out more about the benefits of knowledge management for your service desk.

You can also set up ‘hover-over’ speech bubbles next to a question in your form. Just make sure the text within these bubbles is as concise as it can be, otherwise your customers may still find it quicker to call your service desk.

What can you do? Start tailoring the content you link directly to your forms. You can also have a go at creating a knowledge article that specifically acts as a guide to help your customers fill out one of your longer, more complex forms.

Find out if one of your end users can find a specific form in under three clicks. If they can – great! If they can’t, find out why.

4. What happens once your customers submit a form?

Someone submitted a form to your service desk – now what? If you have a change template linked to your form, it’ll be processed by the relevant teams in the right order. But, is it possible to minimize the number of approval steps or the complexity of the workflows you create in the background?

In a starters/leavers process, several departments are typically involved in a change. A good idea would be to get a representative from each of those departments together to brainstorm if there’s scope for improvement. For example, do you always make sure you have a new desk delivered before you start assembling the starter’s PC?

What can you do? Make sure you evaluate how efficient your change management processes are every six months or so to keep up with any organizational changes that may have occurred during that time.

Always keep your customers in mind

As you probably have noticed, it’s key to think about your services from the perspective of your customers. Download our free customer centricity e-book for a complete guide to building a customer-centric service desk.

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