Look for These Top Skills and Traits When Hiring a Change Manager
Attention to detail
A change manager will pay close attention to all details of a proposed change to assess the risk and benefits accurately.
The ability to manage ambiguity
Changes are not always straightforward. There may not always be a clear cost-benefit ratio for the business. Sometimes, a change may, on face value, have a low probability of being beneficial, but may, in fact, be worthwhile. Not all changes will fit into a standard equation. A good change manager will be able to apply his or her intuition to help decide when to overlook some of the rules.
Experience evaluating trade-offs
The change manager must be able to assess when the benefits of putting a change into production outweigh the potential risks or even certain losses. Not every situation is a win-win. Occasionally, the change manager must accept a change even when losses cannot be avoided.
Experience/Training in risk-management techniques
Risk assessment and management is a critical part of the change manager’s role. Formal training in this area is a great advantage for a change manager in the IT industry.
Dependency/impact assessment
Changes are not always straightforward. There may not always be a clear cost-benefit ratio for the business. Sometimes, a change may, on face value, have a low probability of being beneficial, but may, in fact, be worthwhile. Not all changes will fit into a standard equation. A good change manager will be able to apply his or her intuition to help decide when to overlook some of the rules.
Communicating to executives and business users
Communication skills are critical to the success of a change manager. It is essential the change manager is able to speak, with authority, to people at all levels of the organization.
Training/Mentoring stakeholders about processes
A good change manager will be able to share information easily and train others in change management techniques. This allows the change manager to delegate authority successfully to others for change assessment and approval.
Experience with highly stressful/time-sensitive business processes
When changes must be made urgently, it is likely they are required to ensure the availability of critical business systems. When these systems fail, there is a huge amount of pressure on the ITSM team to fix what has failed. The incident manager will be the first in the crosshairs, which is then likely to move to the problem manager, as he or she determines the root cause. Last in line in this stressful situation is likely to be the change manager, as he or she rushes to implement a change to bring the system back online.
For this reason, it is essential the change manager is able to work well within stressful situations, communicate effectively during them and coordinate the recovery efforts, effectively.
Measuring a Change Manager’s Value and Performance (metrics)
There are a number of metrics that will help assess the success of the change management process, and the value the change manager is delivering:
1. Change management process cycle time
How much time is required for a change request to proceed through the change management process from logging to either rejection or delivery? As organizations increasingly move to a DevOps type of delivery model, this cycle time must be dramatically reduced, while also keeping the risk to the organization at a reasonable level.
2. Percent of changes released without proper authorization/approval
How much time is required for a change request to proceed through the change management process from logging to either rejection or delivery? As organizations increasingly move to a DevOps type of delivery model, this cycle time must be dramatically reduced, while also keeping the risk to the organization at a reasonable level.
3. Post-release incidents that changes caused
This is another metric with an ultimate target of zero, but it is unlikely to happen. When change is well-managed, these calls will be minimal. If they ever increase, then it is likely your change management process is at fault.
4. Percent of change requests that deviate from normal change management processes
Change reviews will examine how often changes become part of the emergency change process. If this number is excessive, then it may be a sign people are using this process to avoid the standard change management process, opting, instead, to fast-track them via the emergency process. If the number of emergency changes suddenly increases with no obvious reason, then this may be another sign your processes are slowing change too much.