What is Change Governance?
Change Governance is a new, enterprise-wide approach to successfully controlling change that fully integrates the development, implementation, and adoption of change-related policies and processes across multiple roles, sites, and platforms. Unlike traditional change management approaches, Change Governance effectively bridges “silos of change” within the enterprise and creates a common frame of reference for business and IT. As a result, IT is better positioned to deliver strategic value to the business.
How does Change Governance work?
Serena makes a Change Governance approach possible through a shared, transparent, end-to-end process-driven framework that enables companies to:
- Visualize change: Understand the potential impact and interdependencies of a change before it happens
- Orchestrate change: Translate that understanding into effective change policies and processes
- Enforce change: Drive adoption of change policies and processes across the enterprise to ensure changes are efficient, consistent, and successful
Why do companies need Change Governance?
In today’s climate of increased regulatory demands, enterprise complexity, and constrained resources, traditional or isolated change management approaches can expose a company to excessive risk, poor quality, and high costs with damaging—even crippling—consequences. Serena Change Governance solutions remove the risks of change and turn change events into business advantages: improved business practices, increased profitability, competitive advantages, and more. With Change Governance solutions companies are assured that changes will happen seamlessly, efficiently, and successfully—every time, everywhere.
What can companies do with Change Governance solutions?
Serena offers Change Governance solutions that enable companies to successfully manage change events in two critical areas—Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Operations Process Management (OPM). Serena ALM solutions integrate all change activities across the application lifecycle, from requirements definition, modeling, and software change configuration management to building, testing, and deployment. Serena OPM solutions bring Change Governance capabilities to processes that involve multiple people and multiple systems in the enterprise workflow, focusing specifically on those processes at the intersection of application development and IT operations.
How is Change Governance different from software change management (SCM)?
SCM, a subset of Change Governance, allows companies to orchestrate and enforce change policies and processes in the application lifecycle. While SCM products may be appropriate for managing change as a discrete project within “silos” such as business units, geographies, job roles, specific platforms, Change Governance solutions enable companies to holistically view, integrate, and control change across the entire enterprise.
How is Change Governance different from IT Governance?
IT Governance, a subset of Change Governance, allows companies to visualize, orchestrate, and enforce change policies and processes within the IT department. But because its scope of influence does not extend beyond IT, and because it lacks strong tools for ensuring that changes are adopted as planned, IT Governance is not a substitute for a Change Governance approach that enables companies to holistically view, integrate, and control change both within and outside of the IT department.
What are the core features of Change Governance solutions?
Serena Change Governance solutions are comprehensive, enterprise-wide solutions that are not only process-centric, but also vendor and platform neutral, flexible, scalable, support best practices such as ITIL, and provide the best economies and ROI by reducing the need for numerous products and vendors.
What Change Governance products does Serena offer?
Serena Change Goverance solutions for ALM include: Serena Dimensions™, Serena Dimensions RM, Serena Composer™, Serena ChangeMan® ZMF, Serena PVCS® Professional™, Serena PVCS Version Manager™, and Serena Mover™.
Change Governance solutions for Operations Process Management include: Serena TeamTrack® and Serena Collage®.
What are the benefits of Serena’s Change Governance solutions for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?
Centrally-managed requirements discovery and elicitation, modeling and prototyping capabilities, real-time views into project status and activities, automated and coordinated application development processes, and lifecycle audit capabilities are some of the features of Serena’s tightly integrated Change Governance solutions for ALM. With the ability to span multiple roles, sites, and platforms, Serena’s ALM solutions enable companies to:
- Visualize the impact of proposed application changes to improve software quality and delivery.
- Orchestrate application requirements and development processes across multiple users, sites, and platforms to optimize workflow, increase quality and productivity, and reduce costs.
- Enforce the uniform adoption of application lifecycle processes and best practices for operational efficiency, accountability, and assured compliance.
What are the benefits of Serena’s Change Governance solutions for Operations Process Management (OPM)?
Role-based views, cost and resource tracking, a graphical process designer, on-the-fly configuration, and anytime, anywhere access to real-time data from any web browser are some of the features included in Serena’s OPM solutions. These features, and more, provide companies with the ability to:
- Visualize workflow processes to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
- Orchestrate a systematic and seamless rollout of enterprise-wide processes.
- Enforce consistent process adoption to ensure best practices, real-time views, and a baseline for process optimization.
What platforms do Change Governance applications work on?
Serena’s Change Governance solutions support the widest set of platforms in the industry, including mainframe, distributed and desktop systems.
Do Serena Change Governance solutions allow me to use my existing applications and tools?
Yes. As part of its commitment to provide companies with the freedom to select from the fullest range of tools and technologies, Serena provides the broadest software integration capabilities in the industry. Serena Change Governance solutions integrate with third-party IDEs, tools, hardware platforms, operating systems and databases.
Additionally, Serena initiated and is leading the Eclipse Foundation Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project. ALF creates a central negotiator to manage interactions between applications and bind together legacy, non-Eclipse-based technologies with modern Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) tools to deliver a single platform- and vendor-neutral framework to integrate change initiatives across the enterprise.
Do Change Governance solutions support ITIL?
Yes. Serena Dimensions™ and Serena TeamTrack® solutions both enable organizations to orchestrate and enforce ITIL guidelines and best practices in the area of Service Support and have earned PinkVerify™ Service Support Enhanced product verification. By automating best practices, these Change Governance solutions enable companies to:
- Visualize the IT Service Support process, gaining a holistic, closed-loop view of an Incident from inception through infrastructure change and back.
- Orchestrate seamless communication and activities across IT functions for improved service, maximized efficiency, and reduced costs.
- Enforce consistent process adoption to reduce training time, increase efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and create an extensive audit trail for compliance.
Are there any companies using Change Governance solutions today?
Several companies are currently using a Change Governance approach to effectively control change initiatives. Among these are:
- AdvancePCS, the nation’s largest provider of health improvement services, who experienced a 175 percent increase in productivity and an 83 percent decrease in software expenditures.
- Thomson Beta Systems, the technology services provider to more than 30 brokerage firms, who saved an estimated $1.4 million per month while increasing productivity and reducing system downtime.
- LookSmart, a search-based solution provider, who achieved a 24-hour resolution of compliance gaps, reduced audit time and cost, increased efficiency that resulted in over $270,000 in savings per month and was able to effectively handle 1,000 percent growth in listings without adding personnel.
Where can I get more information on Change Governance solutions?
You can also call us directly at 800-547-7827 or by contacting any of our regional offices.
