Activity-Based Scheduling of IT Changes

摘要

Change management is a disciplined process for introducing required changes onto the IT environment, with the underlying objective of minimizing disruptions to the business services as a result of performing IT changes. Currently, one of the most pressing problems in change management is the scheduling and planning of changes. Building on an earlier mathematical formulation of the change scheduling problem, in this paper we take the formulation of the problem one step further by breaking down the changes into the activities that compose them. We illustrate the theoretical viability of the approach, discuss the limit of its applicability to real life scenarios, describe heuristic techniques that promise to bridge the scalability gap and provide experimental validation for them.