Change Management in layman’s term is a process, where stakeholders come together to review and accept or reject changes made to an existing application, or consent to the deployment of a new application.
COBIT 5.1 establishes processes and practices for Change Management in an organization, including the creation of a testbed, performing acceptance tests, promoting to production and manage releases, amongst others. These are principles that world-class organizations adhere to, in Change Management. While Access Bank is COBIT 5.1 certified, the Bank definitely practices a tweaked version of Change Management.
Do I start with how the Compliance Team finds it hard to pinpoint what changes have been made on the Organization’s system via a terrible CIMTRAK? Or how Senior Officers bypass the Change Management Committee to deploy changes. Will you blame these people? — No
The organization rewards results, often to the detriment of due process. So it is okay to happily announce at the HQ: “We’ve gone live” while the branches are littered with customers who are unable to log in on their mobile app, or the Contact Centre, having a long queue of calls because someone has chosen to “Go live” to meet a deadline. Often times, it’s a case of “Go live, fix issues later”
So when on March 28, 2020, I woke up, like other Customers, to see that I have been logged out of my Mobile App, my own mobile app, I was pissed. I went through my email, perhaps if I had missed a Communication item, but none was there. The Social Media was agog with “Download AccessMore” and I could only remember how Man Utd fans wanted to buy Fred to unlock Pogba. Football fans know the rest of the story.
Perhaps this article gets to the right channel and due process becomes the order of the day. Perhaps, Team leads who keep deploying changes that affect all the Bank’s Mobile App users without utter disregard for Change Management Committee will not be accorded Manager of the Year.
Perhaps, the importance of Change Management will be seen. Perhaps, everyone is scared of the MD. The MD and CEO is a highly respected man. I cannot exactly tell why he was revered — Perhaps, he is known to ridicule Managers, while comparing them to low-ranking Executive Trainees — especially during the dreaded Monthly Managers’ Meeting, especially when they don’t meet the (One Bank) Fund Mobilization Target. Whatever the case is, no one wanted to get in his crosshairs, and lying was always the way out.
Flashback to the firm’s bi-weekly EXCO report, documenting activities in the IT Team, including Application Performance, Outages etc. A couple of times, on the CIO’s request, figures were bumped up as no one wanted to explain to the MD why a Legacy Application, which the CFO has refused to approve a budget for its replacement, was underperforming. It’s always easier to say it performed at 99.9% Uptime and move on than explain why the failing application performed at 95% Uptime. And so is an example of the lying culture, or rather anointing that flowed from the top, to the bottom, and to the other parts.
So maybe your app is malfunctioning because someone played down the severity, or is afraid to lose his job. So next time you’re complaining that you can’t log into the App and you’re tweeting at the MD or ringing up the Contact Centre, have a rethink: Perhaps, someone somewhere is downplaying its severity.
Or just maybe someone is trying to sabotage the good works of the men trying to build the World’s Most Respected African Bank
