Member Article

Minimising the risks associated with change

itSMF UK, the UK’s largest service management user group, is pleased to announce the next event in its 2012 UK Seminar series. This seminar is targeted at change, configuration and release managers who want to ensure changes are successfully released into the live environment with minimal risk.

Entitled Change, Configuration & Release Management, theseminar will take place on 7th March 2012 at Yorkshire’s premier venue and conference centre, Sheffield City Hall in Sheffield from 9.00 to 16.00. The event is being sponsored by Nimsoft, the IT management as a service (MaaS) provider. Key speakers on the day include Steve Ingall from iCore, Tony Oxley from Rolls-Royce, Richard Horton from The University of Leeds and Matthew Burrows from BSM Impact.

The seminar aims to help participants to understand how change, configuration, and release management work individually and together. It will look at ways to change the attitude, behaviour, and culture in the whole IT department as well as how to maintain service availability using these three core processes. The seminar will also look at how to maximise the value and optimise the costs of executing these processes; and at the same time discover how tools can help.

Participants at the event will find out how to decide if they need a single or multiple change processes, which are the essential items of information to record and maintain in the configuration management system, and how to get started. They will also gain a good understanding of the differences and similarities between project management and release management which will be a key focus, and will discover the skill profiles of effective configuration, change and release managers. At the end of the day, participants will be able to effectively design, plan, schedule, package and deploy releases.

Martin Neville, CTO and Head of Service Management at the Audit Commission and a member of itSMF UK’s Events Committee, commented on the seminar:

“IT departments are constantly working to keep up with the pace of change. But this is not without risk: most incidents are caused by a change to the live environment. Balancing the need for change with the need for stability is one of the biggest challenges facing IT departments today. Good change, release and configuration practice and procedures help reduce the risks.

This seminar has the perfect mix. There are presenters from consulting firms at the forefront of thinking in this area and also from practitioners who live and breathe these processes daily. Anyone attending this seminar will be guaranteed to gain valuable insight into how they can improve their approach to change, release and configuration management.“

For more information about the itSMF UK seminar series, or if you are interested in attending, please contact Teresa Corre at the itSMF UK office on 0118 918 6500 or events@itsmf.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mark Lillycrop .