Managing transition and change

What do we mean by managing transition and change?

Taking a planned approach to the implementation of new technology and changes to existing technology.

The transition phase is a critical element of the ICT service lifecycle and includes planning for and executing the ‘go live’ of new systems or changes to existing ones and ensuring that they are appropriately supported on an ongoing basis.

Knowledge

• Understanding of best practice transition planning and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.
• Understanding of change and release management for ICT.
• Understanding of different project delivery approaches, including Agile and waterfall and the way that transition may need to be managed differently for each.
• Understanding how to engage stakeholders in the management of ICT transition and change.

Skills

Able to:

• Design readiness for transition criteria: Working with key stakeholders to ensure that the organisation is ready to transition services to live from both an organisational and a technical perspective.
• Design service transition metrics: To measure the effectiveness, completeness, and efficiency of the transition process and to confirm when it is complete.
• Plan and co-ordinate transition: Ensuring effective design, build and testing of technical solutions, maintaining up to date configuration records to support release management, ensuring that role and responsibilities are clear and that roll back plans are in place to manage risk.
• Manage deployment: Transition the services to the live environment effectively in line with plans.
• Document and share knowledge: Ensuring that essential information relating to the operation of the live service is made available to all who are expected to support it. 
• Manage risk: Ensuring the likelihood of risks such as downtime and potential data loss is minimised through appropriate planning, testing and assurance, and that mitigations are in place in case transition is not effective.
• Communicate and collaborate effectively: With stakeholders at all levels, including technical and non-technical teams, managing expectations, and keeping people up to date about progress, any issues and workarounds and ensure they know where to access support.