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Webinar Summary & Highlights
This webinar covers a detailed presentation on the best practices for change management in Jira Cloud for enterprises, mainly focusing on IT service management projects. Jan Szczepanski, a senior consultant and co-founder of Jodocus, shares his extensive experience with Atlassian tools and emphasizes the importance of effective change management in adapting to new business requirements and technological advancements.
Here are the highlights and best practices discussed in the video:
Introduction to Change Management:
Jan begins by defining change management and its significance in ensuring that IT changes are made smoothly, with minimal disruption to business operations. He mentions various standards and frameworks, like ISO 20000, ITIL, and ISO 27001, highlighting the importance of change management in maintaining information security and compliance.
Types of Changes: Different types of changes, including regular, standard, and emergency changes, are explained. Regular changes require evaluation and approval due to their novelty and potential impact. Standard changes are pre-approved due to their routine nature, while emergency changes are made in response to urgent issues.
Best Practices for Jira Cloud Change Management:
- Testing in Staging Environments: Before applying changes to the production environment, testing them in a staging environment is crucial. This minimizes risks and ensures potential issues can be identified and resolved beforehand.
- Processes and Service Catalog: Having a structured process and a detailed service catalog helps manage changes efficiently. This ensures consistency and control over how changes are handled.
- Understanding the Need for Change: It's essential to have a clear understanding of the reasons behind a change. This involves engaging with stakeholders and assessing the current state versus the desired future.
- Prioritizing Change Requirements: Changes should be prioritized based on their impact, urgency, and alignment with the organization's strategic goals. Stakeholder input is valuable in this process.
- Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Thorough testing is essential to ensure that changes meet the required standards and fulfill user needs.
- Effective Change Execution: A detailed implementation plan helps in executing changes smoothly. Maintaining open communication with stakeholders throughout the process is key.
- Backup Before Making Changes: Having a robust backup strategy is crucial. It ensures you can revert to the original state if something goes wrong during the change process.
- Communication and Training: Effective communication and training are pivotal for the success of change management initiatives. It's important to be transparent about the reasons for change and to provide continuous support to stakeholders.
Jan emphasizes that change management is a critical component of IT service management, aiming to minimize the risks associated with changes while ensuring that services remain stable and reliable.
Webinar Transcript
Jan: Change management, let's talk about it. As technology evolves, markets adapt, and businesses grow, IT infrastructures must evolve and meet new demands. But making necessary changes to internal business systems can be difficult, risky, and time-consuming. More importantly, these IT changes can directly impact the work and productivity of employees who rely on business technology. And it doesn't matter if that change is a new office printer or the implementation of an entire new technology or process across the enterprise, either way, proper documentation, approval, and implementation are critical.
Imagine a routine task such as applying a scheduled antivirus update, something outside of the Jira Cloud environment first, and then we go deeper into that topic. This necessary maintenance is usually very simple and straightforward, but while the security patch is being applied, internal and maybe customer-facing systems may be down or experiencing other problems. As a result, the company is faced with a difficult decision: accept regular disruptions during system updates or risk the serious consequence of not updating security tools.
To maintain competitiveness, IT teams must be able to provide stable, reliable, and consistent service, and at the same time, they must help businesses adapt to new requirements through regular service updates. Unfortunately, these two goals are often at odds. Stability and reliability require consistency, while service updates, by their nature, require change.
Jan: Some examples: I used to work for a really big enterprise here in Germany, and it was really impressive. I used to work there as a developer for Groovy and Python scripts, and in that business, they did everything in Jira, from the business ideas to production. Everything was in Jira. So, from working out the business idea, getting development teams, and marketing sales involved to IT architects, security, compliance, legal, and budgeting processes, everything was in Jira. Sure, there were integrations into budgeting systems and accounting systems like SAP, but everything was in Jira.
As a developer, my local Jira instance deployed on my virtual machine where I could develop, and then we had the three staging instances, right? Test environment, a development environment, a test environment, and then the product environment. And that was quite impressive.
A more common use case we see nowadays is the topic of IT asset management, where customers track all their business assets in Jira assets, not only those who have an IP address but also those who don't, right? Like the chair I'm sitting on, the table I'm working with, the elevator, the fire extinguisher, everything that has a label attached where you have regulatory checkups, let's say, everything is in Jira assets.
It starts with procurement, where you, let's say, order a new laptop for a new onboarding, you track the progress, you do the inventory, you do the asset accounting, and the whole asset lifecycle management. And with that, hundreds of automations have evolved. I found this picture yesterday on LinkedIn; when one of those automation or even import jobs of assets fails, it might look like this, right? So, one little automation can screw up your whole process, and you might want to test that before you go live.
