Case Studies in Infrastructure Change Management

Chapter 1. Introduction

How do you as an engineering practitioner know if the change project you are managing qualifies as “infrastructure change”?

• Are the terms upgrade, migration, or decommission part of the change definition?

• Does your change affect multiple teams, organizations, products, and services within the company?

• Does your change impact engineering capabilities to maintain current plans, configurations, processes, or to apply software or policy changes?

If your answer to the above questions is yes, you are rolling out a large-scale infrastructure change.

We define infrastructure change management (ICM) as the execution of a planned, large-scale infrastructure change in order to increase project velocity, reduce cost, and lessen the overall pain inflicted on affected teams and customers.

A cliché, though apt, idiom for this kind of large-scale infrastructure change is “building the jet while flying it.” Keeping the jet in flight and on course while building and rebuilding it requires an enormous amount of people to work as a team. If an engine dies, the crew needs to assess the situation, determine a corrective course of action, and ensure the safety of passengers onboard while communicating the issue in the right way, at the right frequency, to avoid widespread panic.

Large-scale infrastructure change works the same way, requiring coordination and communication with many teams, good processes and documentation, risk identification and management, monitoring, ...