It seems to be quite common in small-or medium-sized organizations to let the IT department decide upon the changes to be implemented in the infrastructure. This can include application server upgrades and DCs.

Moreover, this process is usually done with an attitude of "inform the IT manager and that's it". Whenever administrators hear about Change Management, there is a lot of resistance because of the perceived additional bureaucracy.

To ensure full accountability and proper management of your IT infrastructure, however, Change Management is a necessity, and implementing it can save your infrastructure from accidents and unsupervised changes, which can cause problems with other parts of your AD of which the person implementing the change was not aware.

Generally, the process could be seen as shown in the following figure. Stakeholders are the parties who depend on the AD, such as heads of business units, the IT manager, and the CFO. It is important that the change...