Managing Change in IT

In the world of IT services, we’re responsible for planning and implementing change across the technology we manage, and the organisations in which we work. We’re also responsible for supporting those affected by the changes we make.

Education is a really interesting sector for this. We have around 13 weeks every year where students aren’t in school, and so it’s quite easy for us to make changes during normal working hours without affecting many staff. It’s actually one of the many benefits of the sector – no shift-work, no weekends on-call for the team.

So the temptation is to plan change for when the staff & students aren’t around. That must be best, right? Minimise the disruption? Make the changes when the demand for support is at its lowest?

Well, sometimes…

The thing is, there’s more than one type of disruption. With the hectic nature of staff & students returning from their holidays, it’s easy to focus on the disruption caused by “carrying out the change”, and completely overlook the disruption caused by “having changed things”.

From an education & a business perspective, the Summer break is the worst time for IT changes that affect staff & students.

Simply put, the more we change during the holidays whilst people aren’t around, the more change they have to adapt to at once. We have 6 weeks to make changes and staff have just one day to work out what we’ve done!

New terms are often when schools make changes on the business or education side of things too. Just when they’re trying to focus on the new changes to how they do their role, they’re also having to adapt to the changes that we’ve made too. In September everyone starts back at, pretty much, the same time. New staff have joined, old staff have left, there are new parents to meet, new students… the list goes on.

The primary currency that we’re dealing with isn’t (for once) the resource of our technical teams – it the capacity of everyone else to adapt to the change. By changing things during school holidays we place even more demand on that precious currency at the very point where we can least afford it.

Some systems changes can only be done out of hours, and school budgets often prevent the kind of twilight working that is more common in business. If you need to rip the building apart for a large recabling project, then the school holidays is perfect for this, but my suggestion is that we spend this currency deliberately, and sparingly.

From the perspective of the IT team, this also means that we don’t have to delay everything until a the next big maintenance window, and then cram everything in. We can break down changes into smaller projects, plan them carefully, and prepare staff for them well. Then, we can execute them during term time.

Staff will have more capacity to keep up with the changes, you’ll spread the workload for your support teams, and you’ll be able to deal with any issues as they arise, rather than finding out that you missed something 2 weeks ago, and that a whole bunch of other things need to be re-done.

Yes, this process takes more planning, but planning is important:

If you don’t have time to plan a change, you certainly don’t have time to clean up after the change has gone wrong.

Give it a try with your next suitable project. One thing is for certain, your staff will appreciate coming back to systems that they know and then being around to see the changes happen. You never know, some of them might even thank you!