On strategies for planning the assignment of human resources to IT change activities

Abstract

Planning is a fundamental sub-process of the overarching Information Technology (IT) change management process, proposed by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library to help organizations to deploy and maintain IT services in an effective and efficient way. A major issue behind IT change planning and of special importance for the alignment of changes with business objectives/constraints - the adequate projection of which human resources to assign to change activities - has not been properly addressed in previous investigations. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose and analyze novel strategies for planning the assignment of human resources to change activities. These strategies explore different ways to prioritize humans to activities (i.e., from the most to the less efficient or proficient humans), and to rank/cluster the activities that should be analyzed first. The novel strategies have been experimentally evaluated through ChangeAdvisor, a prototypical implementation of a decision support system that helps IT administrators in the task of understanding the trade-offs between alternative change designs.