Change management can affect 1,000s of employees in many ways. Users in different groups may need different levels of notification on scheduled change events.
Change Management and BMC
The risks of poorly managed IT changes range from minor inconveniences to disasters that cost millions of dollars and directly affect short-term profitability. Quoting the Gartner Group, BMC states that “80 percent of downtime is from people and process failures, and change plays a significant role in that. Investing in change management pays off in ROI immediately, as business availability levels generally rise by 25–35 percent or more.”
BMC has made significant efforts to address the need for effective change management for larger enterprises in the release of its BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite® (ITSM 7.0). It includes a Change Management application, designed, according to BMC, to deliver “comprehensive policy, process management and planning
capabilities that help you increase the speed and consistency in which you implement changes, while also minimizing business risk and disruption.”
Customers have enthusiastically embraced ITSM 7.0. According to many BMC users, the first BMC Remedy module typically implemented with ITSM 7.0 is Incident Management, which is far more ITIL-compliant than previous versions of ITSM. Now, many of these same users, after having mastered the implementation of the Incident Management module, are turning their attention to BMC Remedy Change Management, which is virtually a complete redesign of the change management functionality of previous versions of the ITSM suite.
These users are discovering how BMC Remedy Change Management increases the availability of business management systems, makes implementing changes easier and faster, and enables IT to support critical business services more effectively than ever before.
BMC Change Management with Kinetic Calendar
Many BMC Remedy Change Management users are also discovering the benefits of creating greater visibility into BMC Remedy Change Management events with Kinetic Calendar.
Kinetic Calendar is a native BMC Remedy application that provides the ability to visually display any time-based information captured or generated within BMC Remedy systems. It is perhaps the quickest and easiest way to graphically display BMC data online. It translates any BMC Remedy time-based data into a visual calendar format, which enables end users to more easily recognize and comprehend BMC Remedy data and its relevance to their responsibilities. Kinetic Calendar was developed to meet the demands of BMC Remedy customers for better visibility into their IT processes.
The flexibility of Kinetic Calendar allows organizations to create virtually any type of customized calendar based on BMC Remedy data. Kinetic Calendar users have been very creative in finding new applications for it. Among the many examples of calendars now deployed are:
- Release Management
- Outage Calendars
- On-call Support Scheduling
- Training Scheduling
- ITIL Process Reviews
- SLA Monitoring
- Vacation Calendars
- Facility Resource Management
A growing number of BMC Remedy customers are using Kinetic Calendar as a valuable extension of BMC Remedy Change Management. BMC Remedy Change Management itself focuses on change management data and workflows, and provides one of the software industry’s best platforms for the initiation of change requests and their review, approval, scheduling, implementation, closing, reporting, and auditing. Kinetic Calendar takes this functionality a step further by providing visibility of Change events to the entire organization.
Why is this important?
Many organizations that have implemented BMC Remedy Change Management have discovered that as their use of the module grows, both in terms of the volume of change requests handled and the number of business users affected, the ability to effectively communicate changes using different styles tailored to the needs of various user groups has grown in importance. This communication can be accomplished through emails, memos and reports, or it can be done by giving users access to online calendars tailored to their individual business needs. Calendars provide drill-down capability to give users as little or as much detail as they need about specific changes. The calendar approach improves acknowledgment and understanding of change events by those who will be affected.
In most organizations, the vast majority of these users won’t be licensed BMC Remedy users. Rather, the users affected by changes will be business managers in HR, finance, operations and other areas in all the different locations where the organization operates. Some of these users will need a broad perspective; others will only need visibility into how changes will impact their own immediate work units. These views need to be simple, uncluttered and easily navigated. Some users will need views that are easy to drill into for more information on change events.
BMC Remedy Change Management users—responsible for scheduling and managing change events and serving on Change Approval Boards (CABs)—need views that make it easy to see how one change event impacts another and whether scheduled change events collide with other scheduled events. Many of these users may need access to multiple views from the same calendar interface. This is especially true in larger IT organizations that may be required to manage hundreds of change events daily in multiple departments and at multiple locations.
Cassy Lueneburg