How Zendesk Change Management Can Benefit Your IT Intensive Organization
By: Assetsonar Team
Tags: Itsm, Best Practices, Change Management, Itam, Service Desk Management

Digital transformation is a major undertaking for any organization and after implementation, businesses continue to implement changes to further optimize operations. A robust change management strategy and processes are the key to a successful digital transformation. Zendesk change management enables you to take an effective and efficient approach towards a changing process — whether it is a changing ticketing process or an IT infrastructure change.

Why do organizations need change?

Traditional organizational hierarchies can be a hurdle when it comes to moving forward with the transforming digital world. With agile, disruptive, and innovative businesses in the industry, you need to move quickly in order to stay in the game.

According to IDC, 85% of enterprise decision-makers say they have a time frame of two years to make significant inroads into digital transformation or they will fall behind their competitors and suffer financially.

However, making major business changes is not easy and lack of proper management can lead to major problems. Multiple studies have shown that 75% of the change management initiatives fail. Why is that?

Poor employee adoption, lack of defined processes at every step, usage of outdated tools, lack of an integrated ITAM software, or inadequate focus on communication are some common culprits.

Zendesk change management when integrated with ITAM software streamlines your processes, helps you keep all the relevant information updated, and guides you through every step of the process.

In this blog, we will take a detailed look at how Zendesk change management can make your change management initiatives a success.

Types of Change Management

There are four types of change management initiatives that Zendesk change management can help you with:

1. Standard Changes

Standard changes are the ones that occur frequently in order to keep up with the ever-evolving digital world. These changes are low risk and due to their reoccurrence, organizations already have pre-established procedures for guidance.

The Change Management Wizard Process is perfect for such a scenario where you are going through a standard change and want to achieve maximum efficiency. Zendesk change management capabilities allow you to trigger a workflow that routes implementation actions on the relevant areas or groups.

2. Emergency Changes

Emergency changes are the ones that are urgent and have to be implemented as soon as possible. They may be as a result of a major incident and therefore, such changes have high failure chances.

However, if the procedure proves to be successful, it can be modified into a standard change protocol for when some similar incident pops up again. Zendesk change management allows you to set up the basis for such urgent incidents so you can have a streamlined workflow throughout.

3. Major Changes

As the name suggests, these changes are significant in terms of implementations, risks, and their impact on your business. Zendesk change manager works seamlessly with other apps for processes like tasks, approvals, and calendars to help you execute the change successfully.

Through Zendesk, you can easily generate tickets for approvals which are usually required for such huge implementations. Although the major changes usually differ based on the nature of change, size of the business, and complexity of the change, Zendesk’s easy management system makes this process much easier.

4. Normal Changes

Although these changes are somewhat similar to standard changes, they are more important than the standard ones. A normal change may translate into a change in IT infrastructure or a change to a particular service. These may include hardware, software, networking, or environmental changes. With various Zendesk change management workflows, you can be sure that you successfully execute these changes.

Navigating the way with Zendesk Change Management

Now let’s see how you can implement change in your organization and how Zendesk can help. Before you start off with the process, you need to properly plan the changes, get approvals from higher authorities and implement those changes. This process includes the following steps:

· Submission — The ticket would be initiated within Zendesk ITSM and the necessary information will be extracted from the integrated ITAM knowledgebase. Through Zendesk change management, you would be able to assign or change roles on the ticket, retrieve the users' database from the ITAM tool and delegate the tasks for a streamlined process.

· Planning — In this stage, further backup plans like change rollout plans or associated downtime estimation and other such factors are considered and decided upon. The equipment downtime information is updated on the ITAM tool so nobody checks it out during the management process.

· Approval — Change requests usually require authorization before the implementation phase. With Zendesk, once the ticket has been created, you can easily escalate it for approval. Automating the approval process means that the entire process is up to the pace and no approval requests are being overlooked.

· Implementation — Once authorized, the ticket is handed over for the deployment process. With Zendesk change management making it all easier, you can quickly create tasks, assign and coordinate with different teams and can also set up task dependencies to ensure that nothing is being missed out.

· Review — Upon the completion of the change, the changes are updated on ITAM software, a post-implementation review is carried out before the ticket is closed.

· Closure — You can record the outcome of the entire change management process as successful, failed, or incomplete. Recording these metrics would give you useful data for when the next change process comes along.

If you have integrated your Zendesk ITSM with an ITAM tool, you can also establish roles for change management activities like risk management checks, performance measurement and you can restrict access to authorized people only.

Change Management Best Practices

Following are the ways that can help you get the most out of Zendesk Change management:

1. Understand that every change process is different so identifying the change and its technicalities are important. Identify the risks and the downtime so there are no surprises later.

2. You should have processes rolled out for different types of change processes, save them in your ITAM knowledgebase so you don’t have to start from scratch every single time.

3. While assigning tickets on Zendesk, make sure that you are also assigning roles and delegating responsibilities to speed up and streamline the change process.

4. Put an effective approval mechanism in place so every relevant individual is aware of the changes and their impact before implementation. This can be made easier by integrating your service desk with an ITAM solution.

5. Communicate the expected changes, risks, and downtime with all the people who are going to be affected.

6. Always measure the progress and effectiveness of the change with real-time data tracking.

7. Implement continual maintenance and servicing schedules to ensure that your IT operations run smoothly.

8. Define your key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can demonstrate improvements.

Benefits of Zendesk Change Management with integrated ITAM

A formal change management process empowered through Zendesk should address many of the pain points in your IT operations. Following are a few benefits of Zendesk change management when it is powered with a robust ITAM tool:

· Change management processes help you save time in the long run. Once you have streamlined the processes and have laid down the standard procedures on Zendesk, these processes will become less resource-dependent. You can upload the relevant checklists and documents on the ITAM knowledge base for when the next change management process comes along

· You can schedule the changes and wouldn’t have to worry about rushing the deployments.

· With Zendesk change management tools and everything being tracked through an ITAM tool, you would have fewer change-related incidents.

· It would increase awareness about the change between departments and decrease the risk of missed impact assessments.

· With every step being tracked, you can see every change that has impacted the outcome of a project and can forecast better decisions for next time.

Read More: 6 Ways a Zendesk ITSM Integration With Your ITAM Software Will Benefit Your Business

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