– The procedure to ensure that all changes are controlled, including the submission, analysis, decision making, approval, implementation and post implementation of the change.
• ITIL describes Change Management as:
– The process of controlling changes to the infrastructure, or any aspect of services, in a controlled manner thus enabling approved changes to be implemented with minimum disruption.
– Governed by the Change Advisory Board
The key to the difference is at the beginning of each statement, Change Control is a procedure whereas Change Management is a process.
In other words there may be many changes being controlled under the Change Management process. Each change needs good Change Control but the Change Management process oversees all of the changes. It is possible to have good Change Control but failures because there is no Change Management.
For example two different IT teams are each working on separate changes that will change the same server, both teams control their changes very well but problems happens at implementation because there was no communication between the teams and one change is having a detrimental change on the other change. With Change Management the fact that two teams were going to change the status of the same server would have been noticed and those teams would have been asked to liaise and communicate