I’m pretty done with old school change managers that act like ITIL is the only sane way to practice safe, reliable management of systems. In fact, I’ve never, e

I’m pretty done with old school change managers that act like ITIL is the only sane way to practice safe, reliable management of systems. In fact, I’ve never, ever seen anyone go full hog ITIL in IT leadership in the F500 that had ever worked at a high performance engineering or IT organization - it appears to be correlated like Six Sigma with low performing organizations after they adopt it (performance in the HBR study I saw for Six Sigma correlated negatively with the S&P 500). What I used to do for demos was to automate the manual processes of ITIL style change review including diffs of the code, test plans executed, test coverage, etc. and the dependency graph of CI impacted by a change (because CMDBs are broken in 99.9% of orgs, you need tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, etc. to give the granularity necessary for a thorough review even in bureaucratic hell). All the other parts of dealing with bureaucracy is pretty much filling out other fields like a list of approvers, signed commits, org, billing codes, etc. are all a matter of trivia rather than smarts. Your changesets need to become higher grained enough to warrant all the human eyes involved. But going backwards like that in processes is usually a sign that a place that is in decline though so that alone should be setting off warnings.