Although I’m not working in Change Mgmt I gained a lot of experience with handling Changes. Besides the recommendations you can look up in frameworks like ITIL, here some axioms you should follow from my experience.
Follow your processes
If you set up a proper Change Management in your company the majority of your Changes should follow a standard process. A high number of emergency cases in which certain steps have to be skipped are a clear symptom of low process maturity and significantly increase the likelihood of a Change which ends in a disaster.
Never do a Change on a Friday
It’s a classic mistake to schedule a Change for Friday. It looks tempting as there is a tendency that people have more available slots on Fridays. But there is a reason for that. Friday is the last day before the Weekend (big surprise). People keep their schedule free to finish everything before the weekend and go home in good conscience. The biggest problem from a Change perspective is that in case of an incident people won’t be available during the weekend to fix it. That means your business could be impacted for an additional 48h compared to do a Change on another day.
Know your impacted Business
I see it often that people schedule their Changes based on their assumptions and not on facts. E.g. if you observe online shopping, based on the customer data I analyzed online shopping doesn’t follow traditional shopping curves. Whereas the peaks for F2F shopping are between 10:00-18:00 (Lunch and groceries after work). Online shops don’t follow this curve. There is no big decrease after 6 pm. Based on the data I analyzed I wouldn’t schedule a Change for an Online Shop between 09:30-22:00. Especially as you have to assume a worst-case scenario in which you have to follow a fallback plan. But this is based on the data I have. If you run an online shop for 24/7 food delivery it may be that your peaks are when the other deliveries are closed.