I often get asked where change evaluation takes place.  Isn’t it part of change management?  It is a separate process however it is driven by change management and is triggered by the receipt of a request for evaluation from Change Management. Inputs come from several processes including the SDP and SAC from Design Coordination, change proposal from SPM, RFCs, change records and detailed change documentation from Change Management.  It holds discussions with stakeholders through SLM and BRM, testing results from service validation and testing to ensure that its members have a full understanding of the impact of any issues identified and that the proper risk assessments can be carried out against the overall changes and in particular the predicted performance, intended effects, unintended effects and actual performance once the service change has been implemented. The purpose of change evaluation is to provide a uniform and structured means of determining the per...

When an organization is planning on a major change that will incur significant cost, risk, time and engagement of resources along with organizational impact, it is best practice to initiate this activity through the Service Portfolio process.  Before this new or significantly changed service is chartered, it is important that it be reviewed for how it may impact the short, medium and long term support of other services currently being delivered, the pool of limited resources that will be utilized for this undertaking and on the change schedule itself. The Change Proposal is used to communicate a high level description of the change and is normally submitted to Change Management for authorization.  Authorization, however, is not an approval for implementation, but is a measure to allow the service to be chartered so design activity on the service can begin. In some cases the proposal may be created by someone other than Portfolio Management, such as the PMO or SMO. Thi...