Change management in help desk for SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365

Changes are an essential part of the working process in your organization, that’s why it is important to handle that right. Every day, new initiatives and projects are launched to improve performance, increase profits, or implement a new feature.

But your initiatives will always have an impact on how people do their work and change management is a part of ITIL for initiatives to deliver expected results and outcomes. In Plumsail HelpDesk, our change management process is closely aligned with the release and deployment management ITIL process.

I divided the article into two parts — the first will be about why you may need a configuration of change management and the second will be about how to do that.

So, here is why you need to change management (and some essential questions to ask):

• Organizations are facing the need in more faster, complex and functional changes and methodologies like Agile are popular than ever before. When change management done right allows an organization to achieve their strategic vision and thrive in ever-changing world. Applying change management enables organizations to deliver results on each change more effectively.
• Change management can increases the success rate of the effort. For example, McKinsey data shows that the ROI captured from excellent change management is significantly more than with poor change management.
• Organizations are facing the need in more faster, complex and functional changes and methodologies like Agile are popular than ever before. When change management done right allows an organization to achieve their strategic vision and thrive in ever-changing world. Applying change management enables organizations to deliver results on each change more effectively.
• Changes are always about people. In Plumsail, the human being is always the first metric to measure, so we never ignore the people side of change. When the adoption and usage of a solution is ignored, and the focus is exclusively on meeting technical requirements, the result is excessive risk and cost. That’s why change management is the discipline to help reduce those mission-critical risks.
• Organize a change is difficult. You need to provide direction on sequencing milestones, deliverables, activities and resources over the lifecycle of an effort. Change management’s goal is to provide your employees with everything they need to succeed in change.

About our approach in Plumsail, you will learn below.

How to configure change management in Plumsail HelpDesk

I decided to make some assumptions for this case as I’d like to show how to configure a basic change management. If you don’t yet have a formal change management process, or are looking to track basic change requests and don’t know what to do, this is a great place to start. ITSM change management in Microsoft 365 takes the first place here and Plumsail HelpDesk will help you with communication for successful deployment of changes.

So, for change management you need three simple ingredients:

• The team;
• Planning and monitoring;
• Commitment.

As for the team, you can create a change management team in SharePoint groups. This team can include your SharePoint administrator, developers, project managers and some key persons. Then you can set up a group/team site for this team. You can go further and install Plumsail HelpDesk for this site for members to communicate. Prioritising communication is a way for successful management of changes. In Plumsail HelpDesk, you can configure different permission levels for End-users and team members while keeping track of all conversations in one place.

For planning and monitoring, you can use Microsoft Planner. It is is a planning application available on the Microsoft Microsoft 365 platform. As Plumsail HelpDesk for Microsoft 365 comes with a set of Microsoft 365 services, you will get a tool for planning and discussing your changes.

In Plumsail, we use Microsoft Planner to plan changes including hotfix releases. For backup and rollout plans we set due dates and assign tasks to responsible employees. It is also helpful that it is possible to add check list to each tasks of a plan. This is a sample plan:

Once the plan is ready, it can be send for approval. If you need automated approval process for change requests, it can be done with the help of Microsoft Flow approvals. It allows approval directly from an email message:

This is the basic configuration of change management. You can go further and add some fields to your tickets with Forms Designer if you want to get more information about changes.