Focus on frequent and transparent communications between the project team and change management.

Misalignment between IT change management and project management leads to headaches for both practices. Project managers should aim to be represented in the change advisory board (CAB) to ensure their projects are prioritized and scheduled appropriately. Advanced notice on project progress allows for fewer last-minute accommodations at implementation. Widespread access of the change calendar can also lead project management to effectively schedule projects to give change management advanced notice.

Moreover, alignment between the two practices at intake allows for requests to be properly sorted, whether they enter change management directly or are governed as a project.

Lastly, standardizing implementation and post-implementation across everyone involved ensures more successful changes and socialized/documented lessons learned for when implementations do not go well.

Benedict Chang
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

To align projects with the change lifecycle, IT leaders must:

• Coordinate IT change and project management to successfully push changes to production.
• Manage representation of project management within the scope of the change lifecycle to gather requirements, properly approve and implement changes, and resolve incidents that arise from failed implementations.
• Communicate effectively between change management, project management, and the business.

Loose definitions may work for clear-cut examples of changes and projects at intake, but grey-area requests end up falling through the cracks.

Changes to project scope, when not communicated, often leads to scheduling conflicts at go-live.

Too few checkpoints between change and project management can lead to conflicts. Too many checkpoints can lead to delays.

Set up touchpoints between IT change management and project management at strategic points in the change and project lifecycles.

Include appropriate project representation at the change advisory board (CAB).

Leverage standard change resources such as the change calendar and request for change form (RFC).

Increase the success of your changes by integrating project touchpoints in your change lifecycle.

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Decide which IT projects to approve and when to start them.

Right-size IT change management to protect the live environment.