The primary goal of change management is to enable the implementation of necessary changes with minimal disruption to IT services. The process ensures the use of standard procedures for effective and rapid changes, whether it is the introduction of new services, the management of existing ones or a change in the code. It starts with the creation of a change request in a customer portal or service desk and ends with a confirmation of closure.

Keeping the process resilient requires more time for administration and therefore dedicated employees which a big company could easily provide, especially when it is ITIL compliant and has its processes strictly defined.

The ideal change management process in SMBs - The Trilemma

A resilient change management process ideally provides high value to customers, doesn't take up a lot of time and isn't expensive. These things can be hard to achieve in an SMB, because of the lack of time, capacities, and resources. More mature companies use expensive IT Service Management systems (such as ServiceNow) to keep their processes under control, provide support to customers, and manage changes effectively among a lot of other things.

Provides high value to customers

Small teams can become immersed in operational activities such as resolving customer incidents and issues, which then leaves them with no time to effectively and continuously contribute to customer value creation. Customers can become dissatisfied due to poor management of IT services and no proper reaction to their change requests and their implementation.

This may threaten the success, growth and existence of SMBs.

Doesn't take up a lot of time

If SMBs start implementing specialised workflows they can fall into the trap of unnecessarily increasing the complexity of their processes. In fact, they would rather need less bureaucracy (typical of larger companies) and more orientation to people and their customers.

Isn't expensive

Another aspect to consider is the costs in terms of ITSM software and people who work in this specialised industry. These are expensive and SMBs are neither prepared for this kind of investment from a business maturity nor cashflow perspective.

Conclusion

The customers of SMBs also need to be satisfied with the changes performed and feel the value that the company provides. The problem in SMBs is mainly transferring values and information that come with a change. However, patterns in small companies show that the lack of capacity and communication with the customer makes it hard to perform a change professionally while giving the customer the feeling that they get something worthy of their investment. Therefore, I think that automation of this process and additional marketing of a completed change request could provide better information and value transfer between the two parties and could save more time for the company. On the other hand, this would need an initial investment of the company, which is a part of the trilemma.