IT Change Manager Job Requirements

IT Change Manager coordinates all change activities/initiatives within an organization's information systems and IT infrastructures. He/she is responsible for the overall quality of the change management process by ensuring that requested changes meet business objectives. IT Change Manager also ensure among others adherence to the organization's change management policy and procedure with respect to IT change requests, end-to-end stakeholders involvement in the process and judicious application of change controls to prevent unauthorized and disruptive changes from being migrated to production. The job scope of an IT Change Manager is not limited to changes arising from new IT projects and acquisitions, changes in business systems as a result of changing business rules and requirement, changes in technology enabled products, system upgrades, etc. IT Change Manager is responsible for documentation of change activities long the change lifecycle and could use automated means or tools (e.g. HP Service Manager) to drive the process end-to-end. IT Change Manager ensures that stakeholders within the change management process from the initiator/requester, authorizer/approver (change advisory board), assessor (risk function e.g. IT Risk, IT Control and Information Security), tester/quality assurance, release/deployment, post-implementation assessor (internal audit) play their respective roles in ensuring that changes meet business requirement and intended objectives. While change initiatives are approved for implementation, the IT Change Manager must ensure that adequate roll back plans are documented and measures put in place to rollback the solution to its last known working state before the change was applied. He/she ensures implementation of measures to detect unauthorized changes across the enterprise IT platform/infrastructure by deployment tools such as file integrity monitoring (FIM) tool like Tripwire, Cimtrak, etc to track modifications to files, codes or parameters. Among other functions, the IT Change Manager is responsible for reviewing detected changes made in information assets enrolled in the FIM tool against approved change items (CI) and escalating discrepancies or unauthorized changes for management action.

Below are summary of responsibilities of a IT Change Manager:

Reporting line of an IT Change Manager

IT Change Manager reports to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of an organization.

Professional Certifications for IT Change Manager

To be endorsed as an IT Change Manager, practitioners must acquire certification such ITIL Foundation, Practitioner, Intermediate, Expert or Master Certifications by Axelos, ISO 20000 (IT Service Management System) certification by ISO/IEC, COBIT 5 Foundation and Implementer certification by ISACA, among others.