IT change management best practices for Your Business Refreshes

So, you’ve completed a technology audit on your own or with your Managed IT Services Provider and prioritized the order in which you’ll close gaps in your tech infrastructure.

That’s great, but what comes next?

At this point it is highly advised to remember that there are actions you should take prior to implementation for any changes to be the most successful and well-received by your team.

Change produces stress in any area including technology environments, and among those who implement or are affected by the change. This is why considered change management is so critical for successful implementation.

Change management is an approach that deals with the change or transformation of organizational processes, objectives, and technologies.

The goal of change management is to find strategies to implement and govern transformation while also assisting people in getting accustomed to it.

Applying change management best practices can enable your organization, regardless of size or industry, to scale and adapt more smoothly to changing market conditions without losing or unduly stressing key team players.

Five elements of effective change management for your IT refreshes

1. Identify

Most change management strategies recognize that identifying what to improve creates a solid foundation for clarity, ease of execution and success.

Most changes are made to improve a process, a technology, or a result. Therefore, identifying the objective and clarifying goals is crucial. This also involves selecting the resources and individuals capable of facilitating and leading the initiative.

Start by asking the following questions to gain a better understanding of your core mission:

• What are you changing? A server migration to hosted cloud IT services, implementing a hybrid IT workspace, maybe starting new managed IT services?
• Why is this change occurring? Hardware reaching its end of life, need to ensure business continuity, or planning an IT pivot to meet emerging demands in the market?
• Which systems and processes might be affected? In the case of IT service relating to your server, all systems might be affected for a time unless there are redundancies in place. Or effected systems may be more specific depending on the area of work.
• How would this affect employees, customers, and others in the short term? These need to be predicted and accounted for so employees can plan to work around interruptions, and customers are well informed with their needs are or at the very least are not caught unawares by a service interruption.

2. Evaluate

Change evaluation attempts to analyze crucial transformations before letting those changes integrate into usual operations.

Here are a few suggestions for the evaluation stage:

• Examine technology mapping and dependencies to ensure you understand the implications of pulling specific systems offline for updates. You want to know ahead of time all the areas that will be affected.
• If a failover* operation isn’t an option, assess peak usage for all affected users to ensure that system downtime isn’t scheduled during peak usage times.
• Determine the processes that need to be modified as well as the individuals who oversee them.
• Define how various internal and external user groups will be affected.

* The capability to switch to a reliable backup system instantly and seamlessly is known as failover.

3. Manage

These are the areas that require your attention:

• If applicable, seek an executive sponsor to propel your project forward and hold you accountable for deviation from your objectives.
• Before detailing your change management strategy, meet with appropriate team leaders to discuss your plan and solicit their views.
• List and connect with relevant process owners and provide them with implementation deadlines.
• Know which platforms and technologies will be affected by upcoming changes. Remember to gather emergency contacts to tackle unforeseen mishaps.

4. Create

After completing the previous steps, create a change management strategy and draft an expected implementation timeline.

The IT change managementbest best practices says that strategy you create must be comprehensive to act as a roadmap defining the concrete steps your organization will have to take.

And who is responsible for each one, to smoothly implement the change management process.

This is crucial to avoid disrupting workflows as much as possible and assist your team in navigating a change.

5. Implementation of IT change management best practices in 2022 for Your Business Refreshes

Once all the key stakeholders have approved the change management strategy, it’s time to put the changes into effect.

This frequently requires cross-team collaboration and, on occasion, the support of third parties such as technology suppliers, and consultants.

A Managed IT Services Provider (IT MSP) can be an invaluable partner bringing expert IT consulting services and a wide range of technical proficiency to ease any business IT transition.

Collaborate for Business IT success

There’s no easy way around it — dealing with change is often a challenge.

Without a defined strategy in place, avoidable inconsistencies are more likely to occur and you risk disrupting essential operations and overloading or possibly losing valuable team members due to frustration or exhaustion.

Working with a specialist MSP can help you reduce organizational stress while more efficiently updating your information technology ecosystem.

An expert Managed IT Services Provider provider like Sequentur can take a significant burden off your shoulders, allowing you to focus on other critical business matters and the more internal aspects of change management.

Contact us to develop a change management strategy for your upcoming technology infrastructure refresh.

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