Most IT incidents don’t start as incidents. They start as poorly managed changes.

In the world of IT Operations, we love a good scapegoat. When a service goes dark, we blame human error, bad luck, or a flaky vendor. But if you peel back the layers of your incident backlog, you’ll usually find a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight back to a Change Request (or a lack thereof).

The Reality Check

We’ve all seen it. A major outage triggered by something "minor":

  • A quick security patch.

  • A simple firewall rule tweak.

  • A standard vendor upgrade.

When a change is rushed, unreviewed, or uncommunicated, an incident isn’t just a possibility, it’s an inevitability.

The ITIL Truth: It’s Not About the Red Tape

There’s a common misconception that Change Enablement exists to create red tape or slow engineers down. If your process feels like a hurdle, you’re doing it wrong.

The whole purpose of the process is to reduce risk.

A Good Process Forces:

  • Impact Thinking: What actually happens to downstream services if this fails?

  • Rollback Planning: If it hits the fan, how do we get back to Green in 60 seconds? (And no, reinstalling is not a plan).

  • Peer Review: A second pair of eyes to catch the obvious mistake that the person doing the work is too close to see.

  • Timing Discipline: Not pushing to production at 4:55 PM on a Friday.

A Bad Process Looks Like:

  • The Ticket = The Change: Zero actual planning; the ticket is just a record of what already happened.

  • The Review = A mindless "LGTM": If your reviewers aren’t actually looking at the config, they aren't reviewing.

  • The Strategy = "Just do it and hope for the best."

The 3 Questions Every Change Must Answer

If your process doesn't force your team to answer these three things, it’s not a process, it’s just a checkbox:

  1. What breaks if this fails? (The Blast Radius)

  2. How do we undo it? (The Exit Plan)

  3. Who needs to know? (The Context)

If you can’t answer those three, you shouldn't be touching the production environment. Period.

The Bottom Line

If your incident volume feels mysteriously high, stop blaming your technicians and start looking at your change process. It’s likely the very thing breaking your environment.

A process that doesn't prioritize risk mitigation isn't a process at all, it's an incident generator.