How can ITIL Change Management adapt to work with iterative frameworks and the Agile values?

Question

A Change Management representative recently attended a Scrum workshop for a separate business area not under traditional ITIL Change Management. He asked for a some guidance and resources on how his department could better integrate with teams working towards the Agile values particularly Scrum.

How does the idea of a Standard, Emergency and Normal change work with the Scrum cadence which seeks working products every timebox? I know that Scrum is a framework to which we can add patterns and techniques as required but ITIL processes like the CAB are relatively fixed and Change Management can be laborious for Agile teams.

Is there some detailed white papers or guidance or case studies about companies making this transition?

I have found dozens of blog posts but they are piecemeal and very aspirational.

Answer 1

It is difficult to see how a traditional ITIL Change Management process would work with Scrum.

Some of the reasons for this include:

• In Scrum we look to have a potentially releasable increment at the end of each sprint and we typically release frequently. It is hard to see how this can be done in combination with an ITIL process unless it has been streamlined and made very responsive.
• In Scrum the Product Owner is responsible for prioritising the product backlog and often decides when releases will happen. This responsibility will typically clash with the roles and responsibilities of the ITIL process (such as the CAB).
• In Scrum we look to have everyone required to deliver a release in the Scrum Team. If there are dependencies on people outside the team that are involved in the change management process then this disrupts one of the core aspects of Scrum.