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Changes vs. Service Requests

RightStar TeamJune 28, 2013

It can sometimes be hard to identify which processes in an organization should be changes and which should be Service Requests. For example, provisioning a new server  for a department.  Technically this is a change to the environment but does it really need to be a change? The answer, it depends on how mature the process is.
To better understand this, think about the core reason for Change Management, to manage and mitigate risk from changes to the environment. If the process for provisioning a server is a well documented mature process then using Change Management for it is wasteful. The process that has been developed, manages and mitigates the risk, that is why handling it in Change Management is redundant.

In General, Change Management should be used as a test bed for process generation since its main purpose is managing risk. What will start to happen is the changes will formalize themselves into structure processes. This provides a good starting point to flip the change process into a Service Request, giving the customer a better service experience and freeing up Change Management from the overhead of managing risk. This is a great easy method to implement for Continue Service Improvement.

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