In this session I will describe the journey we embarked upon to embrace the “change enablement” approach to IT change management at Swiss Re, a leading re-insurance company. I will discuss how we addressed challenges with traditional IT change management, where approval is removed from accountability and process heaviness becomes a barrier to delivery. We have introduced initiatives with the aim to enable application teams to maintain control and governance in a way that does not impede the speed of delivery. Initiatives include empowering application teams to own the change approval process, automating change management as part of the CI/CD pipeline, using collaboration tools for chat-based change approvals and leveraging data & metrics to influence approval decisions.

Takeaways:

• IT change management CAN be a DevOps enabler.
• Empowering teams fosters collaboration & feedback.
• Data-driven techniques for change automation allow teams to keep control while speeding up the governance processes.

I grew up in Italy and I’ve spent most of my working life in London. My work experience includes process design, software delivery, IT change management, project management and agile development