Change Management

I think change control/management is one of the most important things an IT department can implement in order to provide a stable operating platform for its users.

The problem with change management, though, is that it can be incredibly burdensome. Not only from a "how much do we capture" approach, but a "how easy is it to capture" dimension.

If your change management system is an Excel document on a fileshare, you run into the problem of consistency, versioning, and no real way of consolidating changes. If anything, a change management system should be incorporated into an incident tracking system in order to correlate changes with specific incidents or events. A ticket system that can intelligently search and apply metadata about changes to each entered incident is something I'd use in a heartbeat.

The system should be able to produce easy to read and useful reports as well. The easier the system is to use, the more changes will be captured, and the more adoption within your department.