In an earlier blog post, I introduced the eight KPIs that are critical for every IT help desk. These KPIs help IT help desks meet their basic objectives, such as business continuity, organizational productivity, and delivery of services on time and within budget. The previous blog post discussed one of the most important KPIs: lost business hours. This post discusses the second KPI that every IT team and business should care about—change success rate.
Definition: The change success rate is the ratio of the number of successful changes to the total number of changes executed in a given time frame.
Goal: Achieve a higher ratio of successful change implementations.
Opinion remains divided on what a failed change implies. It basically refers to any change that did not meet the objectives or go as planned.
Case study: The ASX outage
On Oct. 27, 2011, trading had to be halted at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) for four hours due to a failed change implementation. An upgrade to ASX’s internal network to improve the latency of the trading platform led to unprecedented connectivity issues between the supporting components and the disseminating gateways of the trading system. ASX had to initiate trading services from one of their disaster recovery sites. Finally, to restore normalcy, the change had to be backed out that night.
Understanding the change success rate
A downward trend or a stale change success rate usually results from failed changes due to:
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A lack of relevant information, such as the impact of the changes, the dependencies of the assets involved, the change implementation window, and business priorities.
- The teams’ inability to collaborate on change implementations.
- Miscommunication with end users and stakeholders about the change implementations.
Here are some tips for achieving a high change success rate:
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Perform a proper impact analysis and create a detailed rollout plan with a checklist of tasks to be completed.
- Collect and share all the relevant information from end users and technicians before the implementation.
- Constitute CABs and ensure a strict approval process.
Unplanned changes
Another metric that should be tracked to maintain an effective change management process is the number of unplanned changes. An unplanned change can be an emergency change or an urgent change.
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An emergency change is a service restoration change due to an incident or a change that needs to be implemented quickly to avoid an incident.
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An urgent or expedited change is a change that needs to be implemented quickly due to a pressing need, such as a legal requirement or a business need, but isn’t related to restoring service.
Although there is no industry standard for the number of unplanned changes permissible in an IT infrastructure, this metric is important.
An increasing trend in the number of unplanned changes indicates inadequate planning of changes and poor efficiency in the change management process. Therefore, the process has to be improved to ensure proper planning and execution of changes.
A sudden spike in the number of unplanned changes can be due to unanticipated major incidents that warrant emergency changes to restore service. Such a situation is probably due to an unstable infrastructure, which could affect service availability and, ultimately, the business.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below. In the next blog, we will discuss the next KPI: infrastructure stability. In the meantime, if you are looking for an end-to-end IT service management solution, we encourage you to check out ServiceDesk Plus, our IT help desk software trusted by technicians in 185 countries.
