What is a primary goal of change management in IT services?

The primary goal of change management in IT services is to ensure that changes are made with minimal disruption. Change management involves a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state.

This is crucial in IT environments where changes—whether in software updates, hardware upgrades, or infrastructural changes—can potentially lead to service outages or degradation of service quality. By focusing on minimizing disruption, change management mechanisms, such as risk assessment, change approval processes, and communication plans, are implemented to carefully plan and execute changes. This ensures that any impact on service reliability and user experience is reduced as much as possible, maintaining overall operational continuity.

While improving user satisfaction, automating IT processes, and increasing system performance may be beneficial outcomes of effective change management, they are not the primary goals. The focus is primarily on managing the change process itself to avoid negative impacts on the organization’s IT services and user operations.