Software Maintenance and Change Management in an Organization

Table of Contents

Software Maintenance and Change Management in an Organization…………………………….3

Service Request …………………………………………………………………………………...3

Introduction ………….. …..………………………………………………………………………3

Business benefits of software change management …………………………….…..…………….4

Issues and Facets of Software Maintenance …………………………….. ………………………4

Hardware configuration management ………………………………….…….…………………...5

Software Maintenance / Change Control Checklist ……………………………..…………..…5,6

Change Control a Formal Process………………………….………………………………7,8,9,10

Change Control Challenges……………………………………………………..………...10,11,12

Contingency/Recovery Fall Back Plans………………………………………………………….12

Management Challenges …………….………………………………………….……………13,14

Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................14

References ………………………………………………………………………………………15

Software Maintenance and Change Management in an Organization

In today’s corporate Information Technology environments formal software maintenance, installation and roll out procedures have become very necessary. Because of increased competition and declining customer loyalty, various service delivery levels in every organization are under scrutiny. In IT enterprise wide change control procedures and policies have proven to provide awareness of upcoming hardware / software revisions and protect against various service interruptions or downtime. This paper will analyze the various component of change control, software maintenance processes and discuss the importance of organizations to have a formal methodology allowing proper tracking and an orderly back-out plan.

Company Overview / Summary

McBride Financial Services is a new mortgage start-up company with headquarters located in Boise Idaho. McBride has seven (7) additional branch offices in 5 different states located in Montana(1), Wyoming(2), North Dakota(2), and South Dakota(2). Each office has a professional licensed mortgage broker with a managing broker in the headquarters office in Boise. McBride plans to use web-based technology with self-serve kiosks located in their offices to educate customers about the various loans they offer. Customers are able to apply for their mortgages by filling out the application via a web-based system. McBride Financial has their IT services supplied and maintained by an external third party provider Smith Consulting Services.

Service Request

At the request of Mr. Hugh McBride CEO of McBride Financial, a service request SR-mf-004 has been opened for the development of software maintenance and change control procedure, which is in preparation for new software projects soon to be released within the organization.

Business benefits of software change management

In any complex IT organization formal software change management process is proven to minimize outages to end users and business areas. This can be accomplished using change revision checklists or enterprise