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Case Studies, CS-18-4178K. Brittain, D. Scott

Research Note16 April 2003

Change Management Delivers Uptime to Hershey Foods

Hershey Foods, faced with major system and applicationchanges, established and used change management toensure high service standards and availability for itssystems.

Downtime in mission-critical applications is often linked with alack of any formal IT change management process. Thereasoning is that undisciplined IT changes often cause problemsresulting in downtime. Most enterprises lack strong changemanagement practices or resilient IT architectures that canquickly recover from errant changes. Compounding the problemfurther is the increasing complexity and rate of change, such asthe growth of distributed Internet computing environments, aswell as the impact of changing business requirements.

In 1997, Hershey Foods, a multibillion dollar global food giant,recognized that its move from a mainframe to a client/serverarchitecture — as well as its enterprisewide implementation ofSAP's business applications — could not succeed withoutstronger IT operational processes. With the results of a systemframework design study, Hershey Foods' senior IT managementcarefully analyzed the company's IT infrastructure and identifiedkey management process areas that needed to be focused andimproved. One area identified was the change managementprocess. The goal was to enable higher availability of its mission-critical computing systems and offer more predictable levels ofservice.

Problem: Hershey Foods supports 5,000 end-user desktops thatare distributed across approximately 50 manufacturing plants,sales offices, distribution centers and the headquarters inHershey, Pennsylvania. It operates one primary data center thatprovides 24x7 operations for local and remote facilities, 150 Unixservers, nearly 400 Windows servers (some distributed to plantsand offices) and a complex telecommunications network.

Hershey Foods effectively controlled changes in the mainframeenvironment, but it needed to provide the same discipline andprocess to its now-mission-critical distributed computing

Core TopicsEnterprise Management: EnterpriseOperations Process and Architecture; ITService and Support

Key IssuesWhat is the optimal structure for IToperations, IT support and data centerorganizations?

What strategies and best practices promoteeffective IT service and support?

© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.CS-18-417816 April 2003 2

environment. The drivers in extending this control to thedistributed environment included reducing unanticipateddowntime and user frustration, and deploying change notificationfor increased user communication. Hershey Foods knew it couldnot deploy mission-critical distributed applications (includingthose from SAP, Manugistics and Siebel Systems) withoutcontrolling changes to the production environment. Any otherapproach would jeopardize the business benefits of these criticalapplications.

Objective: Hershey Foods wanted operational changemanagement to:

• Prevent the unplanned downtime of mission-criticalproduction applications.

• Increase consistency and predictability, thereby reducingcorporate risk.

• Improve communications with business users, leading togreater customer satisfaction.

The project's scope encompassed all changes to the productionenvironment, including those to the IT infrastructure (servers,networks and desktops) and applications. Instead of focusingsolely on its mission-critical applications, Hershey Foodsdetermined to be more effective and consistent in implementingonly one set of change management procedures for the entireproduction environment.

Approach: Culture and habit are often big obstacles whenimplementing change management. A strong, visionary changemanagement process leader is needed to educate projectmanagers, system analysts and IT staffs on the need fordiscipline as well as the global business effects of change.Hershey Foods' senior IT management hired a long-serving,seasoned IT professional for the role.

Starting in December 1998, with support from senior ITmanagement, a full-time project team was organized with a coregroup consisting of a project leader, workflow configurationspecialist and the change management process owner. Inaddition, 17 part-time members analyzed Hershey Foods'procedures and investigated change management bestpractices. By July 1999, the team had developed a changemanagement process, as well as formal change policies andprocedures, which culminated with their implementation inOctober 1999. Part of the design included documenting theintegration of change management with other IT processes (seeFigure 1).

© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.CS-18-417816 April 2003 3

A key principle of Hershey Foods' change management processwas to increase communication with business users.Accordingly, the change management team negotiated a plannedmaintenance window of six hours per week for SAP. Changesnot affecting SAP were negotiated separately with businessusers and, subject to their approval, occurred at various timesthroughout the week.

During the process implementation, Hershey Foods developedand conducted training programs, including those that reviewedpolicies, procedures, workflow, change status, approvals,notifications, dependencies, interfaces to other processes, andthe roles and responsibilities of the IT staff. This education wascritical to changing and solidifying the new corporate culture andbehavioral system.

Figure 1Change Management's Integration With Processes and Systems

Note: The acronyms used are unique to Hershey Foods.

Change Processand

Change Tools

Problem and AssetConfiguration

Multiple physical links torelated problems, changes,

requests, assets

SignificantBusiness

Events

PlantProcesses

FacilitiesMoves,

Adds andChanges

InternalAudit

Objectives

ITArchitectureStandards

SAPOSSSAP

CTS

Vendor Processesand Agreements

DisasterRecovery

NetworkServices

ProjectManagement

ProjectApprovalProcess

Holidays, fiscaldates, other events on

change calendar

Include requirements during project design

Ensure that change metricsencompass requirements

Include IT portion in Remedy

Send appropriate notifications

Periodic change requests includeappropriate informationabout bundled changes

Include requirements during contract design

Include requirements during contract design

Checklist templates

Test, implement and back-out plans are touchpoints

A field on the change form references the project

request number

Source: Hershey Foods

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A change review board of about 25 members from the ITinfrastructure and applications areas was also established. Itmeets weekly to discuss, analyze and assess business risk,technical complexity and scheduling before approving orrejecting change requests. Attendance and participation aremandatory, and are tracked and summarized by each operationaldepartment, because representation is critical to the approvalprocess of promoting a change into production. Failure to attenda meeting is addressed by senior IT management.

Changes with high business risk are scrutinized closely, andproject managers must provide tactics to mitigate risk. One tacticrequired for all changes is a back-out plan to quickly restore theprior environment in the event of unforeseen problems.

The change management process leader has the ability to delayor withhold final approval, as well as the responsibility to resolveapproval issues quickly. A weekly summary of reviewed andapproved change requests, as well as associated changerequest milestones scheduled for the week, is published anddistributed to the IT staff. The change review board also reviewsthe results of the previous week's changes and tracks theirprogress. This can be helpful in identifying opportunities forprocess or tool improvements. The change management processleader also attends a daily operations "state of the business"meeting to help identify whether current problems are related torecent changes in the production environment.

Hershey Foods chose the Action Request System from Remedy(a BMC Software company) as its primary tool for changerequests and tracking. Since Hershey Foods also uses Remedyfor problem and asset management, it has benefited from toolintegration — which, in this case, includes reporting thosechanges that are causing problems, as well as problems thatrequire changes as part of their solution. Also, an intranet changecalendar with a Java interface to Remedy was developed toprovide a record for all IT change activity.

Although Hershey Foods has already achieved significant andpositive results from the change management process, it iscontinuing to pursue process enhancements. For example, SAPrelease changes are captured and included in the overall changemanagement process, and are now visible in the intranet changecalendar. Previously, SAP changes were tracked by a separateprocess and only captured in SAP's Change and TransportSystem (CTS) tool. In addition, while Hershey Foods hadfocused its risk assessment primarily on technical complexity, itnow wants to enhance its process of analyzing business risk.This will include assessing the number of users affected as onemeasurement of business risk, as well as pursuing the

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attendance of business managers at the weekly review boardmeetings.

Results: In the last three years, Hershey Foods' IS organizationhas evolved to become a more predictive and disciplined serviceprovider to the company's lines of business. Bettercommunications between business units and IS have resulted ina set of joint expectations with less user frustration. A major goalof change management was to reduce the downtime of criticalapplications. Hershey Foods has exceeded its original target of99.9 percent availability, delivering 99.92 percent availability forits mission-critical systems in 2002 — including those from SAP,Manugistics and Siebel. This translates into less than nine hoursof unplanned downtime per year, per application. Gartnerconsiders this to be best-in-class availability (see "Availability:How Do Your Application Services Stack Up?").

In 2002, Hershey Foods achieved a 97 percent success rate onthe changes it made. Less than 3 percent of them required arollback to their prior state. Linking problem and changemanagement provides opportunities to correlate problems tochanges (and vice versa), and also to shorten the mean time toisolate problems and repair them.

Change tracking also provided management with insight into thevolume of change activity as well as the associated resourcesthat were allocated. As a result, better planning and managementskills have been developed.

Critical Success Factors/Lessons Learned: These criticalsuccess factors describe how to succeed with a changemanagement process implementation:

• Commitment is required from senior IT management toimprove change management processes.

• A prerequisite for success is a full-time position that owns thechange process (for example, policies, procedures, standardtools, roles, escalations, effects and the impact on problemmanagement).

• A formal training program is required for all IT personnel.

• Customized off-the-shelf tools, with a focus on ease-of-use,are critical to ensure adherence to the process. Changerequests should also be entered and submitted with aminimum number of mouse clicks.

• Approval for designed processes should be obtained fromstakeholders before a tool is selected.

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• Management and participants should realize that the changeprocess is never "finished" or "perfect"; continuousreinforcement and improvement must be built into theprocess.

• Change management meetings should be brief to encourageparticipation and waste little time; planning and approvalsneed to be firm before the review meeting.

• The value of the new change process should be stronglypromoted to enhance its enterprisewide acceptance.

Bottom Line: Change management can produce significantbenefits, but it will be challenging to achieve success. Initiating achange management process requires senior management'scommitment, ownership, leadership, funding, training andcommon technology. Senior management must be prepared torealign staff roles, responsibilities and deliverables to adhere tothe new change management process standards.