Change Control / Management

At The SMART Group, we understand that in many cases Contact / Call centre and Direct Sales channels are a direct result of ongoing marketing activity, and sometimes, reaction times to market forces needs to be very fast. We consistently go above and beyond what is expected of us to drive business decisions from a high level down to a functional.

To ensure our clients have a high degree of confidence in our ability to manage change, The SMART Group have a sophisticated Change Control process that services operational, technological and business driven changes:

Change Review

• Each change is reviewed by the management team prior to being submitted to the Project Management Office. In some cases, requests are not practical or feasible.

• All approved changes are documented on both a soft and hard copy basis with appropriate signatures.

Change Assessment

• Changes are assessed and rated on the benefits to the company based on the business strategy of the organisation.

• Assessment takes place by a Business Analyst, who involves relevant stakeholders as part of a cross-functional team throughout the change control process.

• Documentation is produced outlining the requirements, costs, benefits, and impacts to the various ITIL areas (incident, problem, release, service level, capacity, financial management etc.).

Change Authorisation

• The business is able to authorise the change, while viewing internal business priorities that already exist as part of the FSOC (Forward Schedule of Change) – which is also managed by the Project Management Office.

Change Development

• The change is passed to The SMART Group’s IT resources, which set about developing and implementing the change in a staging, development and subsequently production environment.

• The Testing team creates associated UAT documentation / test cases and ensures error logs are documented and logged in the helpdesk interface.

• Once the system has been noted as tested and completed, it is passed back to the Business Analyst to arrange UAT (user acceptance testing) and formal acceptance of the change.

Change Closing

• Changes undergo UAT by the change initiator in a development environment.

• Once this is approved, the change is co-ordinated and rolled out to production – with all relevant stakeholders being informed and on-hand for the change implementation.

• Once the change has been accepted, a review phase (typically 1 week) ensures that any minor issues in production are handled in a timely manner, and finally, the change initiator signs off on the change being accepted.

• This process is expediated by our highly experienced team of Business Analysts and IT staff, who will work closely with you to ensure your deadlines are met, and that any 'as soon as possible' requests are deliverd as fast as possible, whilst maintaining a high degree of quality