Informal Brain

I am currently running a project using Agile SCRUM to deliver a CMDB solution, an Upgrade to Remedy Version 7 and ITILv3 processes. Obviously this type of effort has some pretty profound impact on the organization especially when there are years of process, policy and belief which currently govern perceived best practices.

Obviously the goal of any ITIL implementation should provide an adequate set of controls, and awareness and collaboration within the Enterprise. The teams consuming the current processes are looking for ways to optimize their work, while still conforming to the core principles above.

We have laid out certain goals to mine out more standard changes within our organization to streamline IT. It is apparent that the focus of the organization should be on the large, complex and risky changes while metrics collected during problem management should help us understand if have turned the knob too far one direction.

One of the teams brought an interesting problem to us today. They wanted to document a set of activities which would not require even a standard change entered into out change management systems. This at first raised concerns on my part until I reviewed the kind of things they were talking about. They were asking about day to day system administrative tasks which in my mind would not fall under the definition of a change with ITIL:

The addition, modification or removal of approved, supported or baselined hardware, network, software, application, environment, system, desktop build or associated documentation. — Source ITIL v3 Glossary

What is interesting is that by this definition many day to day administrative tasks such as cleaning up logs, running jobs, etc really don’t fall under the definition of “Change” as they are not modifying a managed CI. For example if an UNIX admin needs to clean out /var should a change record be required? Some may argue that it could affect the system but I believe we could argue that most times it is completely safe.

So my thought here is to require a published document which outlines these types of Day to Day activities which are not changes. The standard would be reviewed and managed under change management and be approved by the CAB. These types of day to day activities would not require any change logs or records within our Change Management system. If problem management shows by trend that this day to day work is causing incidents then we reel them back to Standard or Non Standard Changes.

I would welcome the thoughts of others…